The voice sounds like an air-raid siren with adenoids. The face, a passably good copy of a pickle, is caught 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 May?
In one of her Ernestine routines, she is dunning an invisible Gore Vidal —whose name she pronounces "Veedle"—for $23.64. When "Mr. Veedle" talks back, she threatens him with all those recordings that the phone company has been making of his calls over the years. "I think blackmail is such an ugly word," she tells him in a voice that mixes honey with brine. "Let's just call it a vicious threat."
In another bit, Ernestine complains to Joan Crawford that she was robbed of a dime by a Pepsi-Cola machine. "I want it back, all ten cents of it," she informs Crawford, a highly publicized member of Pepsi's board of directors. Unless she gets it, Ernestine promises, Pepsi's phones will be ripped out a six-pack at a time. "You don't understand," she tells anyone who disputes her authority. "This is the telephone company. We are not subject to city, state, or federal legislation. We are omnipotent."
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 her to look like Shirley Temple."
Edith Ann is not only unlovable; she is a kid you want to kick. "I don't usually get a cold," she says in a voice borrowed from an emery board. "I have leprosy." Her chief concern in life is finding some place to play doctor with Junior Phillips, her six-year-old boy friend. Like other little girls, Edith Ann dresses up—but she puts a doll under her dress so that she looks pregnant.