Ruth Buzzi, Purse-Wielding Gladys of ‘Laugh-In,’ Is Dead at 88

Ruth Buzzi, whose wary spinster wielding a vicious pocketbook to fend off male advances both real and imagined was among the most memorable characters on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” the TV comedy grab bag of a show of the psychedelic era, died on Thursday at her ranch near Fort Worth. She was 88.

Her agent, Michael Eisenstadt, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, which was diagnosed 10 years ago.

With an elastic, expressive face and a gift, both vocal and physical, for caricature, Ms. Buzzi had a long performing career. She played myriad roles onstage in summer stock; appeared on Broadway once, with a tripartite credit (as the Good Fairy/Woman With Hat/Receptionist) in the 1966 musical “Sweet Charity”; performed in TV variety shows; showed up as a guest star in a host of sitcoms; and had minor parts in movies, including “Freaky Friday,” the 1976 identity-swap comedy, and “The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again,” a loopy 1979 Disney western.

Nothing in her career, however, had the enduring appeal of her determinedly unappealing “Laugh-In” character Gladys Ormphby, a combination schoolmarm, delicate codgerette and battle-ax clad in a drab brown cardigan, long skirt, saggy stockings and a hairnet with a knot in the middle of her forehead.

Gladys’s regular appearances on the show — an NBC prime-time fixture from 1968 to 1973 — were generally in skits involving Tyrone, the quintessential dirty old man (Arte Johnson), who would get a little too close, breathe a little too heavily and make a little too suggestive a comment, provoking Gladys to wallop him with her purse.

At a time when social mores were growing rapidly less proscriptive, Gladys, who seemed interested in sex and revolted by it in equal measure, was a vivid, and hilarious, representative of the confusion that reigned among an older, more conservative generation surprised by the sexual revolution.

Ms. Buzzi took on dozens of roles in dozens of skits on “Laugh-In” as part of an ensemble that also included Goldie Hawn, Lily Tomlin, Judy Carne, Gary Owens, Jo Ann Worley and Henry Gibson, with the comedy team of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin as the ringmasters. But her Gladys had a life outside the show as well, making guest appearances elsewhere.

Early on, much of them involved humor at the expense of Gladys’s homeliness, the kind of joking about a woman’s appearance that would be little tolerated today. In the early 1970s, Ms. Buzzi was a guest on “The Dean Martin Show,” and at one point, as Gladys, she enters the set with a complaint she wants to lodge with the star, who is sitting on a stool in his tuxedo. What follows is a skit focused on her flat-chestedness.

“Listen, Dean, I saw that bit you did with the cue card girl before,” Gladys said. “And I don’t see why I can’t be a cue card girl. You name one thing that she’s got that I haven’t got.”

To which Mr. Martin replied that he couldn’t name one, “but I can name two.”

Ms. Buzzi later appeared on “Sesame Street” — as the cartoon voice of the character Suzie Kabloozie, as the owner of a secondhand store and occasionally as a child-friendly version of Gladys. She also voiced a cartoon version of Gladys (alongside Arte Johnson as a toned-down Tyrone) on the animated series “Baggy Pants and the Nitwits.”

In a more ribald vein, Ms. Buzzi appeared as Gladys on several televised celebrity roasts, hosted by Mr. Martin, in which, swinging her purse, she pummeled the daylights out of the likes of Frank Sinatra and Muhammad Ali.

Ruth Ann Buzzi was born on July 24, 1936, in Westerly, R.I., to Angelo and Rena (Macchi) Buzzi. Her father was a stone carver and monument maker. Ruth grew up in nearby Stonington, Conn., where she was a high school cheerleader.

She spent three years as a student at the Pasadena Playhouse in California and made her professional acting debut in 1956, in San Francisco, appearing as a seminary girl in the play “Jenny Kissed Me,” which starred Rudy Vallee.

In addition to her stage and television work, she made dozens of commercials, notably as the voice of Granny Goodwitch in a series of animated spots for Sugar Crisp cereal featuring the character Sugar Bear.

Her television work included guest appearances on comedy series — among them “The Monkees,” “Here’s Lucy” and “Alice” — and even the occasional drama.

She also showed up several times in the late-1960s on the sitcom “That Girl,” as a friend of the central character, Ann Marie (Marlo Thomas as a pre-Mary Tyler Moore single-in-the-city young woman).

Ms. Buzzi retired from show business some years ago and moved with her husband, Kent Perkins, to Texas, where they raised horses and cattle on their ranch. They married in 1978, and he survives her. An earlier marriage ended in divorce. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

In an interview with The New York Times in 1969, Ms. Buzzi traced the origins of Gladys Ormphby to the character Agnes Gooch, the misfit secretary in the 1956 play “Auntie Mame.” (The Broadway musical adaptation of it, “Mame,’’ came after Ms. Buzzi made her discovery.).

“About eight years ago,” Ms. Buzzi said, “I wanted to have some new pictures taken, so I thought it would be sensible to read a bunch of plays and try to find characters I could do. I read ‘Auntie Mame’ and came across this character named Agnes Gooch. And at one point the stage directions said, ‘Agnes schlumps in.’

“I thought that was a great word, and the part was real funny, so I asked myself what would a person look like who schlumped — rotten posture, draggy feet, baggy stockings, speech kind of constipated. So I tried it, and I parted my hair in the middle — the worst thing you can do with a face like mine — and made it really flat with a hairnet. But by mistake, I put the hairnet on sideways, which makes that little knot up there, you know?”

She went on: “Anyway, I had the pictures taken, and about two years later I got to play Agnes Gooch in summer stock. I didn’t do her as extreme as I do Gladys now, but the audiences went crazy laughing. So I thought, ‘Boy, I’ve gotta keep this character, change her name and work her into something.’”

Ash Wu contributed reporting.