Ruth Buzzi, who played a purse-wielding spinster on ‘Laugh-In,’ dies at 88

Ruth Buzzi, famous for her work as handbag-wielding spinster Gladys Ormphby on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” died Thursday, her family announced Friday. The Emmy-nominated actor was 88.

“Ruth Buzzi died peacefully in her sleep at home in Texas,” read the note on Facebook. “She was in hospice care for several years with Alzheimer’s disease.”

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Buzzi’s husband of more than 40 years, Kent Perkins, announced in July 2022 that she had suffered “devastating strokes” that left her bedridden and incapacitated.

“I am living with an attitude of gratitude for 43 years of marriage to my best friend, the greatest person I ever met, the one and only Ruth Buzzi,” he wrote at the time on social media. “Her love for others knows no bounds, and she has spent a lifetime making people smile.”

She could still speak, understand and recognize her friends and loved ones at that point, he said.

Early Thursday morning he wrote on Facebook that Buzzi had “asked me to thank all of you for being so good to her for so many years. She wants you to know she probably had more fun doing those shows than you had watching them.”

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The performer was born July 24, 1936, in Rhode Island and raised in Connecticut. She enrolled at 17 at the Pasadena Playhouse College of Theatre Arts, which was affiliated with Southern California’s Pasadena Playhouse from 1928 to 1969. She also spent six years working in New York, where she was cast in no fewer than 18 revues.

“I was just very very comfortable in that form and I still am and I love it,” Buzzi said in an archival interview posted last year on the “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” YouTube page.

She was in every episode of NBC’s “Laugh-In” (1967-73), where she honed her comedic role as a park-bench spinster, and was among many cast members to utter the line “Sock it to me.” Buzzi was already a fixture on television in the late 1960s with appearances on “The Monkees” (1967) and “The Steve Allen Comedy Hour” (1967) and a part on “That Girl” (1967-68).

In sketches where Buzzi played Gladys, she would typically be sitting on a bench and actor Arte Johnson — who died in 2019 — would sidle up in the character of a little old man and proceed to invade her space. Then he would mutter lines that could be taken in more than one way — and Gladys would always take them the wrong way. Whacks with the purse would ensue. Other actors might be caught in the handbag crosshairs as well if it meant an additional punch line could land.

“You can’t find anyone funnier than Goldie Hawn or Ruth Buzzi or Arte Johnson,” “Laugh-In” co-creator and executive producer George Schlatter told The Times in 2019.

Buzzi said in the YouTube interview that she met Schlatter for the first time after she was recommended for the role by an agent she had previously fired when she was in New York.

She was in New York City working in her first and only Broadway show, she said, playing the parts of “Woman With Hat” and “Receptionist” in the original production of “Sweet Charity” starring Gwen Verdon and directed by Bob Fosse that premiered early in 1966.

“I thought I had made it to the top. I was just so happy in that show and one Friday night before going into the show I got a call from the Steve Allen people, who were out here in California, and they were just about to start a show that was going to replace ‘The Smothers Brothers’ and it was called ‘The Steve Allen Comedy Hour’ and they were looking for someone to be opposite [Allen’s wife] Jayne Meadows.

“This was on a Friday night and they wanted me to be there on the next Monday morning. So I had to go to Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon and say, ‘Hey, this is what’s happening, do you think I should go?’ And they said, ‘Do you think you should go? That sounds fabulous, a series, a 10-week series!’”

She said she didn’t head out until Fosse and Verdon had promised her she could return to “Sweet Charity” when she was done in California.

At the one-on-one audition with Schlatter that followed, he got excited about characters that she presented to him from her time doing 18 revue shows during six years in New York. Buzzi said she felt she was a “good fit” for “Laugh-In” because she was so familiar with the revue-style format.

“Laugh-In” did a special in 1967 and then debuted in 1968, attempting with “The Smothers Brothers” to be relevant to changing times. “Seen from today, it looks a little behind its time, a 1950s person’s version of the 1960s — bikini-clad go-go dancing, hippie jokes, jokes about Raquel Welch’s breasts, even as the dream of the Summer of Love had given way to a year of violence and bad vibes,” television critic Robert Lloyd wrote in The Times in 2018.

Schlatter likely disagreed, as he explained to The Times in 2017 that on the show there had been no rules. “It was a moment of utopian TV. It was a collection of an enormous group of people who were very talented, dedicated and outrageous at a time when outrageousness was coming into vogue.”

Buzzi wound up nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards — all for her work on “Laugh-In” — and won a supporting actress Golden Globe for the show in 1973. She was nominated for two Daytime Emmys, for “Sesame Street” appearances in 1987 and 1994. She did 86 episodes of the children’s show, playing Suzie Kabloozie and other characters.

Among her more recent acting credits were the 2009 film “City of Shoulders and Noses,” “Fallen Angels” (2006) and multiple episodes of the TV daytime soap opera “Passions” (2003). Her final credit came in 2021, when she played Agnes in the movie “One Month Out.”

“Ruth Buzzi brought a singular energy and charm to sketch comedy that made her a standout on ‘Laugh-In’ and the ‘Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts,’” National Comedy Center executive director Journey Gunderson said Friday in a statement. “Her characters, especially the unforgettable Gladys Ormphby, captured the delightful absurdity of the era. We remember her with admiration and appreciation for the joy and laughter she brought to generations of fans.”

Buzzi had stories about “Laugh-In,” including telling The Times in 2011 about working with John Wayne in a sketch where Gladys was not a spinster.

“John Wayne loved us so much. He would do just about anything you would ask him to do. He did one sketch where he was Gladys’ husband,” she said. “They had me wearing a little-bitty cowboy hat and little-bitty guns. I had to hit him, and I kept hitting him waiting for them to say cut. I turned around and said, ‘Please, I don’t want to hit this man.’ It was so funny they put [the aside] in the show.”

Nancy Sinatra reminisced about “Laugh-In” on Friday, tweeting that Buzzi “was a comedic genius” and that “Working alongside her on Laugh-In was the most fun I ever had working. I treasured her friendship and I am heartbroken to wake up to the news that she is gone. I love you, Ruthie. Godspeed, old friend.”

Former Times staff writer Lauren Beale contributed to this report.