Phyllis Diller, who has died aged 95, was a raucous, zany comedian, with a special line in self-deprecation bordering on flat-out self-mockery. In old age she described herself as a sex symbol for men who don't give a damn, and she treasured Bob Hope's remark that she was so ugly that a peeping Tom once threw up on her windowsill.
She patented this frank, outspoken line in female bodily imperfections well ahead of Joan Rivers but, unlike Rivers, who appeared on stage without props or wacky wigs, more or less as herself, with Diller it was all an act. She created a comic persona – wild hair, flailing cigarette holder, splayed feet, absurd costume, loud, cackling laugh – when in fact she was a housewife from Ohio.
Although she made dozens of movies, including three in the 1960s with Bob Hope (who also described her as "a Warhol mobile of spare parts picked up along a freeway"), she was not really known in Britain, except by reputation. She made a splash on Broadway when she took over the lead in Hello, Dolly! for three months in the 1960s.
Her natural habitat was the comedy and cabaret club, with stand-up appearances on US TV on the Tonight Show and later the Ed Sullivan Show, where she developed a huge cult following for her outrageous one-liners. You can still catch a flavour of it all on the YouTube clips where she auditions for the Spice Girls ("I want to be 65 again; the way I looked when I was 30") or takes part in that bizarre US television habit of "roasting" a much-loved celebrity ("Joan Collins was so popular as a teenager, she was 21 before she discovered that cars had front seats; since then, she's had 15 husbands, four of her own"). She was the past master of the addled look, the slow burn, the dry put-down.
She did channel her distinctive comedy schtick into a popular television sitcom, broadcast in the UK in 1967, The Pruitts of Southampton (Southampton, Long Island, that is). The Guardian television critic of the time, Stanley Reynolds, noted a performer who struck him as a cross between Imogene Coca (a zany stalwart of Sid Caesar's and Carl Reiner's Your Show of Shows) and Lucille Ball. Her character was a matriarch in a family fallen on hard times: "Things are so tough, my daughter is thinking of getting married just for the rice."
Born Phyllis Driver in Lima, Ohio, where her father was an insurance agent, she was educated at Lima central high school and studied the piano at the Sherwood Conservatory in Chicago before moving on to Bluffton College in Ohio with the intention of becoming a music teacher. There she met Sherwood Diller and they married in 1939.
The Dillers moved to California and struggled to make a living, Sherwood in a variety of jobs, Phyllis in local newspapers and as an advertising copywriter, moving on to PR jobs and finally regaling private parties with barbed accounts of life in the kitchen. She made her professional debut at the Purple Onion, a San Francisco nightclub, in 1955. By this time she thought she could be as funny as the men she was watching on television. She achieved a national breakthrough on Jack Paar's Tonight Show in 1958, after battering at his door for a couple of years.
The Dillers divorced in 1965 and she married Warde Donovan in the same year. While continuing as a stand-up on stage and small screen, she developed a humorous musical act as the pianist Dame Illya Dillya, appearing from 1971 for 10 years with symphony orchestras across the US. She played for laughs, but also for real, garnering fair reviews for her keyboard technique.
Her second marriage ended in divorce within a year, and she had to settle out of court with her first husband's family over accusations that she was libelling them in her act. Her routine included a fictional husband called Fang, whose idea of a seven-course dinner was a six-pack and a bologna sandwich: "The last time I said let's eat out, we ate in the garage." From 1985 until his death in 1996, she was the partner of Bob Hastings. She is survived by her son, Perry, and daughters, Suzanne and Sally.
Diller's later life was dogged with medical problems, including a heart attack in 1999. Her last big-time stand-up appearance was in Las Vegas in 2002, and she was asked three years later if she missed performing: "I don't miss the travel," she said. "I miss the laughter. I do miss the actual hour … that hour is a high; it's as good as you can feel. A wonderful, wonderful happiness, and great power."
• Phyllis Ada Diller, comedian, born 17 July 1917; died 20 August 2012