This Is A Recording is a comedy album

Comedy album

A comedy album is an audio recording of comedic material from a comedian or group of comedians, usually performed either live or in a studio. Comedy albums may feature skits, humorous songs, and/or live recording of stand-up comedy performances, but the most common type of comedy albums are stand...

 released in 1972 by actress-comedienne Lily Tomlin

Lily Tomlin

Mary Jean "Lily" Tomlin is an American actress, comedienne, writer, and producer. Tomlin has been a major force in American comedy since the late 1960's when she began a career as a stand up comedian and became a featured performer on television's Laugh-in...

. The album consists of comic sketches of Tomlin in her most famous character, Ernestine, the nosy, aggressive, and sharp-tongued telephone operator. The album's tracks include monologues in which Ernestine tangles over the phone with Joan Crawford

Joan Crawford

Joan Crawford , born Lucille Fay LeSueur, was an American actress in film, television and theatre....

, Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...

 ("Mr. Veedle"), Martha Mitchell, and J. Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover

John Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972...

.

The album, Tomlin's first, won her a Grammy Award

Grammy Award

A Grammy Award — or Grammy — is an accolade by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to recognize outstanding achievement in the music industry...

 for Best Comedy Recording. Tomlin became the first woman to win this award for a solo recording (in 1962 Elaine May

Elaine May

Elaine May is an American film director, screenwriter and actress. She achieved her greatest fame in the 1950s from her improvisational comedy routines in partnership with Mike Nichols...

 won for an album with Mike Nichols

Mike Nichols

Mike Nichols is a German-born American television, stage and film director, writer, producer and comedian. He began his career in the 1950s as one half of the comedy duo Nichols and May, along with Elaine May. In 1968 he won the Academy Award for Best Director for the film The Graduate...

; in the years since only Whoopi Goldberg

Whoopi Goldberg

Whoopi Goldberg is an American comedian, actress, singer-songwriter, political activist, author and talk show host.Goldberg made her film debut in The Color Purple playing Celie, a mistreated black woman in the Deep South. She received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress and won...

 among female comedians has won the award.) The album peaked at #15 on the Billboard Hot 200 albums list, the highest charting solo comedy album by a woman ever on the chart.

Track listing

1. "Alexander Graham Bell"
2. "Mr. Veedle"
3. "The Marriage Counselor"
4. "Joan Crawford"
5. "Obscene Phone Call"
6. "The Repairman"
7. "The Bordello"
8. "Strike"
9. "Peeved"
10. "Ernestine"
11. "The Pageant"
12. "The F.B.I."
13. "The Mafia and the Pope"
14. "Mrs. Mitchell"
15. "Awards Dinner"
16. "Boswick 9"
17. "I.B.M."