"If evolution was worth its salt, it should've evolved something better than ‘survival of the fittest,’” muses Trudy, Lily Tomlin’s wisecracking bag lady in The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, “I think a better idea would be ‘survival of the wittiest.’ At least, that way, creatures that didn't survive could've died laughing.”

If “survival of the wittiest” had prevailed instead, indeed Lily Tomlin and her collaborator of over thirty years, Jane Wagner, would count among the earth-dwelling evolved. The stage shows, comedy albums, and T.V. specials the two have co-crafted together are witty in the best sense of the word—that brand of funny that can’t help but also make you think.

Together Tomlin and Wagner—who wrote the scripts for most of Tomlin’s routines, including 1985’s Tony-winning one woman show, The Search for Signs…(which Tomlin successfully revived in 2000)—are rather famously partners in life and love as well as in comedy. The Gay and Lesbian Center in Los Angeles even established a new performing arts center in the couple’s name: The Lily Tomlin Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center, and proceeds from ticket sales there go to providing health services for HIV positive patients.

Although it’s been remarked that Tomlin didn’t “come out officially” until relatively recently, her committed relationship with Wagner has long been openly acknowledged (just not intentionally-publicized). “[I]n most articles, most people refer to Jane as my partner or my life-partner or whatever,” Tomlin explained to Ann Northrop on cable-access program Gay TV in 2000. “We've been around so long and been through so much and I always kind of took a lot of stuff for granted.”

In a Lesbian News interview she explained “I was never deceptive in any way. I never went anyplace without Jane.”

Tomlin even teased around the subject of her lesbian sexuality back in 1977, in her show Appearing Nitely (written by Wagner). Playing a journalist grilling herself about her film role in Robert Altman’s Nashville (for which Tomlin received an Oscar nod), she asks “How did it feel to play a heterosexual woman?” to which Tomlin-as-herself retorts that she “had been exposed to heterosexuals and observed them throughout her life,” obviously positioning herself as something-other-than-straight.

More recently, when a reporter from The Seattle Gay Times asked Tomlin in 2000, “What turns you on?” Tomlin said bluntly (and cutely) “Jane Wagner.”