What would Erma Bombeck do?

There’s a quote going around from Erma Bombeck, the late, legendary essayist.

“When humor goes, there goes civilization.”

The words circulated amid the news that ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s show for comments surrounding Charlie Kirk. The comedian’s line wasn’t about Kirk, but rather his death being co-opted for right-wing political gain. Nonetheless, under government pressure, Kimmel has become part of a wider takedown of left-leaning political thought following Kirk’s violent murder.

I googled the Bombeck quote and found sources attributing it to her, then shared it on my Instagram. Because that’s how I feel, too. Because I fear the federal government is about to steamroll protected speech in a way modern America hasn’t seen. Because I’m a disciple of Bombeck. And because it was 10 p.m., and cooler heads never prevail that close to a pillow.

Then I woke up thinking, hm. Did she really say that? Or was this viral post a symptom of the garbage-in, garbage-out internet that sprinkles misinformation with water and multiplies it?

I contacted the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop at the University of Dayton in the Ohio city where she was raised and buried. Was the line from a column? An interview from her storied career satirizing life as “a simple, average housewife”? The workshop founder referred me to an archivist who could not immediately find evidence of the quote.

Then I went to the book.

When I started writing for newspapers more than 20 years ago, my friend’s mom gave me a thick, yellowed treasury of Bombeck’s essays from the 1960s and 70s. I refer to “The Best of Bombeck” when stuck in the sludgy minutiae of news. Bombeck might have thought herself simple, but she was a brilliant wordsmith and trenchant observer with a talent for infusing suburban drudgery with deep meaning. Bombeck reminds me it’s fine, even crucial, to sometimes wax about lawnmowers and furniture shopping in the midst of political upheaval.

The book is 535 pages. I didn’t find the quote, but it could be lodged in there somewhere.

Here’s what she did say:

She said missing a nap gives you bad skin.

She said Renaissance women were beautiful and had never heard of Weight Watchers.

She said some readers were critical that she let her children watch horror movies. The same people, she said, could turn a blind eye to children who lived in real-life slums. The same people who screamed for fictional violence to be censored could “endure it when it appears on the six o’clock news with a dateline: Vietnam.”

Her children, she said, had seen real communities in flames, college students killed by national guardsmen and “political conventions that defy anything they have seen on a movie screen.

“They have heard language from congressmen that curls their hair. They have seen animals slain to extinction by humans with clubs and shot at from moving cars. They have flinched from gunshots that fell leaders of countries because they hold views that are different from those who slew them.”

Bombeck never wanted to be an activist, was not the stock image of her era’s brand of feminism; she was a practicing Catholic who felt the flashier movement left housewives behind. She avoided espousing politics with a noted exception: the Equal Rights Amendment. She stridently supported it, traveling for years to campaign on its behalf. Women who performed the labor of the home, she believed, were also worthy of rights.

I can’t presume to know what such a complex figure would have said about the hostile affairs of today, especially when current culture wars are rooted in the perceived subversion of traditional family life. I think she’d have plenty to say about the legions of mommy vloggers for whom she paved the way, about snacks with red food dye and the marvel of Amazon Prime.

In this fraught moment, would she say, “When humor goes, there goes civilization”?

All I know is, when she campaigned for the ERA, a politician patted her head and said she should be home having babies. And a store took her books out of the window before Mother’s Day. And she didn’t shut up.

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