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Tomlin was doing the kind of designed-to-confuse stuff seen on the tube today in such shows as the Jamie Kennedy Experiment 25 years ago, all on her own.
She once dressed up disaster-courting Mrs. Beasley in a Red Cross uniform to hand out coffee and doughnuts to those camping out for tickets to her Broadway show, held court in supermarket lines and screwed her face up into the snorting operator Ernestine to make late-night practical joke calls.
Tomlin included snippets of Ernestine informing people their service had been disconnected or the federal government was implementing a new "shift system" for telephone use at the end of one of her videotape series.
PRANKS
"I'd call up and say, 'We're trying to humanize the image of the phone company,' and 'we're going to have the person who's the busy tone of the week,' and 'the person who is the dial tone of the week,' " Tomlin says over the phone from her Los Angeles home. "It was like silly kids doing pranks."
But youth is a time for driving ambition, and Tomlin has mellowed as the years have passed. The 63-year-old lives with her partner and professional collaborator Jane Wagner.
"You realize you spent your life trying to come up with new material and you think, 'why did I do that?' " she says.
Tomlin will bring her particular brand of wry, character-driven humour to Ottawa for a one-night show at the National Arts Centre on Sunday. The appearance is part of a brief, one-off Ontario tour by the Emmy, Tony and Grammy-winning comedienne.
It's Tomlin's first visit to the capital and when she hits the stage you can expect a sample of some of her best-loved characters, including Edith Ann, the devilish youngster Tomlin hopes to spin off into a PBS show, and Ernestine, who has been called the Mussolini of telephone operators.
"Just talking and relating to the audience and fooling around and carrying on and hopefully it has some relevance to your life," she says.
LAUGH-IN
That shouldn't be a problem, considering Tomlin has parlayed her talent into a still-swinging 30-year career, starting with the early '70s smash Laugh-In, where she made her mark. She's also done four television specials, Broadway revues and one-woman shows, had roles in more than a dozen films and a brand new recurring role as the president's wacky assistant Deborah Fiderer on TV's The West Wing.
Tomlin, who has a history of getting on shows she admires, with turns on both X-Files and Homicide, was the one who approached The West Wing about a role.
Instead, creator Aaron Sorkin wrote the role just for her and Tomlin couldn't be more grateful.
"I thought I would just get one or two shots as a guest person or something," she says. "And then it began to dawn on me, I thought, 'oh gee, he's got to replace Mrs. Landingham sometime, maybe it should be me.' "
Tickets for Tomlin's show are $45.50 to $74.50 and available by calling Ticketmaster at 755-1111.