Word: tomlin
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...between a snarl and a smile, the snarl usually winning out. "You are not talking with just anyone's fool," she snorts indignantly. "I am a high school graduate." Who could doubt that Ernestine, the world's most famous telephone operator, has her diploma-or that Lily Tomlin, her creator, is the funniest, most inventive comedienne to come along since Elaine...
Real People. Tomlin's satire delights in big, powerful targets like the phone company and the FBI. (Ernestine suggests in one skit that her company and the FBI work together, since they both tap phones.) "There is bite in her comedy," says Producer George Schlatter, who gave Tomlin her big break on NBC's Laugh-In in 1969. "But she never goes for a joke outside the character. She won't burn herself out because people are interested in her characters, who are real people...
They are all based on real people, at any rate. Mrs. Earbore, the Tasteful Lady, is a takeoff on the country-club women of Grosse Pointe, Mich., whom Tomlin observed while she was growing up in Detroit. Edith Ann, the 5½-year-old thug-Tomlin's best known routine after Ernestine-derives from a little girl she met in a Pasadena hotel. "I wanted to do a child," she says, "and I'd probably thought about Edith Ann for years without being conscious of it. I had some trouble making her scruffy; the Laugh-In producers wanted...
Attention, Diners. Tomlin's first acting experience was in a production of The Madwoman of Chaillot at Wayne State University. After two years of college, she headed for a show business career in New York, where one of her first acts was as a waitress at a Broadway Howard Johnson's. "Attention, diners," she announced over the loudspeaker one evening. "Your Howard Johnson's waitress of the week, Miss Lily Tomlin, is about to make her appearance on the floor. Let's all give her a big hand!" Tomlin's peculiar brand of humor...
...Eartha Kitt, Burt Lancaster, Tom Lehrer, Alan Jay Lerner, Shirley MacLaine, Karl Maiden, Shelly Manne, Fredric March, Walter Matthau, Elaine May, Vera Miles, Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, Tom Poston, Janice Rule, Barbara Rush, Robert Ryan, Eva Marie Saint, Artie Shaw, Tom Smothers, Sonny & Cher, Rod Steiger, Mario Thomas, Lily Tomlin, Robert Vaughn, Jon Voight, Eli Wallach, Ruth Warrick, Dennis Weaver, Raquel Welch, Gene Wilder...