Erma Bombeck - 26 April 1996

A beloved woman died this week and I choose the word beloved carefully, because the cause of her being loved was a talent very much akin to the genius of Mark Twain, for writing about the daily life of ordinary people without sentimentality, facetiousness, marked tragedy, pathos, but with a wry sort of candour that called from the audience an immediate delighted response: She's right but that's me!

In a word she was, I believe America's only woman humourist and if that sounds cavalier maybe I should explain at once what I mean. I have a theory, which was slow to develop but has been confirmed every time somebody pointed out to me yet another funny woman writer: they always turned out to be wits. And that goes at once to my thesis, which is that wits have a target, and it's always somebody outside themselves. The main target of a humourist is himself and at his best he can say blankly stupid things, but he says them with an air of being especially wise. And whereas we laugh with a wit – we better – we laugh sympathetically at a humorist. Let me give an example, two examples.

I wonder if you've ever heard the name of Dorothy Parker? It doesn't matter if you haven't, she was in the great early days of The New Yorker magazine, its resident book critic and sometime theatre critic. I remember a dreadful play which opened on Broadway, it must have been the winter of 1932/3, it was called The Lake. It was I believe, not the Broadway debut of Miss Katherine Hepburn, but her first leading role. In her review, Miss Parker wrote an opening and now a famous sentence – last night at the so and so theatre, Miss Katherine Hepburn ran "the gamut of human emotions from A to B".

Somehow nobody ever quoted a more devastating sentence. That came later. There was in the play an old celebrated American actress never a blinding star but one of those fine actors who till they die are always at work, a perfect pro, her name was Blanche Bates. And Miss Parker came to write – it was notable that whenever Blanche Bates appeared, Miss Hepburn retreated downstage right and downstage left, upstage right, upstage left. Could it be that Miss Hepburn was afraid of catching acting from Miss Bates?

We may hoot over such a wounding shaft, but we're glad we're not the object of Miss Parker's wit. On the other hand, consider the moustache stroking solemn wisdom of Mark Twain, saying, when he'd been in England a month or more, he was going to start a parliamentary campaign. The English countryside he wrote is "too beautiful to be left out of doors...it should be put under glass." Mark Twain was the quite essential American humorist but he was a wit too: in all this grave and beautiful land I have encountered "only one genuinely humorous idea," the Albert Memorial.

I hope this is enough to show even dimly why humorists can be lovable, wits never. Bernard Shaw, Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde, Ambrose Bierce, Jonathan Swift, they've been called many things but loveable is not one of them. Somehow this country abounds with witty women, some of them terrifyingly so. Florence King is one of the funniest writers alive, but an arch misogynist who hates the human race and not without good cause, writes books with such apt titles as with malice towards all and reflections in a jaundiced eye.

However none of this is true of Erma Bombeck who died last Monday in the medical centre here in San Francisco in her 70th year. She was a columnist for most of her life and put together several cherished collections, cherished by a very large middle class audience of women more than anybody, and her titles were such as: If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, Why am I in the Pits and When You look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time To Go Home.

She was born in a small town in Ohio, Erma Fiste, F.I.S.T.E. I think German on her father's side. He was variously described as a crane operator, construction worker, he died of a heart attack when Erma, an only child was nine and she and her mother went off to live with a grandmother. At about the age of 12, she began writing a humorous column for her junior high school paper. She graduated from high school towards the end of the Second War and graduated as a bachelor of arts from Dayton University, and the same year married her one and only husband William Bombeck, first a sports writer, later a high school headmaster, and he was, for her remaining 47 years, her one and only husband. And no wonder. All in himself, he was a goldmine, her favourite subject or at times, when she felt more of a wit than a humorist, her favourite object.

Her career she gave as that of her generation: a mother and housewife. She came too early to hear from the savvy young feminists that you can have it all man, children, business, executive law practice, and when later in life she did hear it, she didn't believe it. But one day in her 38th year she was sitting in her kitchen looking out the window, she wrote: "Watching women like Ann Morrow Lindberg and Golda Meir carving out their own careers, and I decided it wasn't fulfilling to stay cleaning water taps with a toothbrush...I was too young for social security, too tired for an affair, I decided it was my time to strike out".

The last of her three children was now off at school, she wrote a column and persuaded a small suburban paper to pay her $3 a column and the next year, the editor of the big city paper The Dayton Journal Herald spotted her stuff and made her the fabulous offer of $15 a week for three columns. She grabbed it. People used to ask her, how do you choose the subjects of your column? Simple, she said, being a housewife was the only thing in life I could discuss for more than 10 minutes. And that's what she discussed in all her columns for the following 31 years.

You would think she'd have ploughed a grinding monotonous groove, that's always mostly happen to professional humorists who have to be funny twice a week however they're feeling, but astonishingly to the end Erma Bombeck's columns were never mechanical, predictable. She wrote about family life, husband, children, the measles, kitchen stoves, holidays, teen- aging, a husband's capacity to sit before the television immobile watching football: "When a man watches four consecutive football games, he can be declared legally dead".

About her second favourite household chore ironing: "My first being banging my head on the bedpost till I faint." When I tell you that within five years of her first columns she was syndicated in 200 newspapers, and that by the early 1980s in more than 900 newspapers around the world, you'll have gathered that she had not been for years, a house-bound slave or what we used to call a housewife. She earned something just short of a million dollars a year for many years and for the past 20 had lived in a valley out west in the Arizona desert, so most of her later stuff, the themes of maybe three quarters of her output were exercises in remembrance of things past. But they were never memories recalled in the luxury of later life. Until the last year, when she was very ill, she never ceased from doing her own shopping, most of the housework.

She checked the price tags on everything and when her illness was overwhelming her, kept up her spirits with odd recollections and instant little jokes about marriage at every stage. Her spirits stayed unfettered to the end. She banged out what came to mind and it caused the joy of chuckling, sometimes muttering recognition, especially in her huge far flung audience of women, continuing bits of advice on dirty ovens: "If it won't catch fire today clean it tomorrow." On sibling rivalry: "Who gets the ice cream sundae with the lone cherry on top." Women she said, especially married women never cease fantasising all over the country, housewives are fantasising their husbands taking the kids to a fair and leaving them alone for a day. The other day an exterminator knocked on my door asking for directions and I wonder is he the one!

You may well wonder, still wonder why, if I'm right about Erma Bombeck being the only women humorist I know, why this should be so? Well as I implied at the beginning, a humorist is a man who's secure enough in his standing in the scheme of things, that he can afford to make fun of himself. I don't believe that in our civilisation, women have yet achieved the sense of emotional equality to be eager to help a man make fun of them and by the complimentary reason, most funny women are wits or too happy with their ability to strike back.

So why should Erma Bombeck be different? Well following up this thesis, the facts of her emotional life were uniquely fortunate in coinciding with her sense of humour. She was from the accounts of all her friends, a winning happy woman. She watched her husband with an extra touch of steady affection through the years. He was so often the fumbling victim of her pieces, but she was confident enough of her own fallibility to make herself an equal. But I believe this happy balance was due first to her temperament, a sanguine temperament allied to her gift, but both given free reign by the happy state of her marriage. 25 years ago, she told an interviewer: "The good years of my life began with my marriage, the rest has been gravy".

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