Lily Tomlin - Stardom and Classic Tomlin Characters

Stardom and Classic Tomlin Characters

In 1969, after a brief stint as a hostess on the ABC Television series Music Scene, Tomlin joined NBC's sketch comedy show Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Tomlin was an instant success on the already established program, in which in addition to appearing in general sketches and delivering comic gags, she began appearing as regular characters she created that quickly became famous and went on to lives outside of the show in later recordings and television specials:

• Ernestine was a nosy, condescending telephone operator who generally treated customers with little sympathy. Ernestine often snorted when she let loose a barbed response or heard something salacious; she also wore her hair in a 1940s hairstyle with a hair net, although the character was contemporary. Ernestine was almost always at her switchboard taking calls in the sketches. She occasionally called her boyfriend, Vito, a telephone repair man, or her pal Phoenicia, another operator.

• Edith Ann is a precocious five-and-a-half year old girl who waxes philosophical on everyday life, either about life as a kid or things for which she feels she has the answers although she is too young to fully understand. She often ends her monologues with "And that's the truth," punctuating it with a noisy raspberry. Edith Ann sits in an over-sized rocking chair (to make Tomlin seem child-sized) with her rag doll, Doris, and often talks of life at home with her battling parents and bullying older sister, Mary Jean (Lily Tomlin's actual first name). Edith Ann has an over-sized, playfully aggressive dog named Buster and a boyfriend named Junior Phillips, a possibly unrequited love. (No one but Edith and "Doris" are seen in any of the Edith Ann sketches.)

• Mrs. Judith Beasley is a housewife and mother from Calumet City, Illinois who is often chosen for television commercials and offers "good consumer advice". She appears in The Incredible Shrinking Woman as the lead character's neighbor.

• The Tasteful Lady is a somewhat prudish and prissy, conservatively dressed middle-aged apolitical woman who dispenses advice on gracious living and a life of elegance.

• Susie the Sorority Girl is a blonde collegiate who could be the Tasteful Lady's daughter. Humorless and melodramatic, her biggest worries are the likes of who took her missing album by The Carpenters.

• The Consumer Advocate Lady is a dour, austere woman who rigidly inspects and tests products for their alleged value. The Consumer Advocate Lady is something of a variation of Mrs. Beasley, much like Tomlin's "male vocalist" characters Tommy Velour and Pervis Hawkins.

• Lucille the Rubber Freak is a woman addicted to eating rubber whose monologue details her habit from its beginning (chewing the eraser on pencils) to her obsessive rock bottom (eating the tip off mother's cane). Tomlin performed this character as part of her Laugh-In audition.

• Tess/Trudy is a homeless baglady who accosts theater-goers and various passersby with her offbeat observations and tales of communications with extraterrestrials. ("They don't care if you believe in 'em or not - they're different from God.")

Tomlin was also one of the first female comedians to break out in male drag with her characters Tommy Velour and Rick. In 1982, she premiered Pervis Hawkins, a black rhythm-and-blues soul singer (patterned after Luther Vandross), with a mustache, beard and close-cropped afro hairstyle, dressed in a three-piece suit. Tomlin used very little, if any, skin-darkening cosmetics as part of the character, instead depending on stage lighting to create the effect.

Ernestine and Edith Ann were by far Tomlin's most popular characters, and she occasionally performed as them in various television programs over the years.

In 1970, AT&T offered Tomlin $500,000 to play her character Ernestine in a commercial, but she declined, saying it would compromise her artistic integrity. In 1976 she appeared as Ernestine in a parody of a commercial on Saturday Night Live (Season 2 Episode 1, September 18, 1976), in which she proclaimed, "We don't care, we don't have to...we're the phone company." The character later made a guest appearance at The Superhighway Summit at UCLA, January 11, 1994, interrupting a speech being given on the information superhighway by then-Vice President Al Gore. She appeared as three of her characters in a 1998 ad campaign for Fidelity Investments, specifically without Ernestine and Edith Ann. In 2003, she made two commercials as an "updated" Ernestine for WebEx.

Tomlin brought Edith Ann to the forefront again in the 1990s with three animated prime-time television specials and also publishing Edith Ann's "autobiography" My Life, co-written with Jane Wagner, in 1995.