Erma in Bomburbia: Erma Bombeck

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cheers everyone up by saying, "Never mind the mess here, honey, let me tell you about world-class squalidness." And then yarns away, maybe, about babies so wet that their diapers give off rainbows (a Phyllis Diller line she loves to steal). Or about her husband, the football watcher, who sits in front of the tube "like a dead sponge surrounded by bottle caps" until "the sound of his deep, labored breathing puts the cork on another confetti-filled evening." About her schoolboy son who flunked lunch. About her washing machine, which eats one sock in every pair; her kids ask where the lost ones go, and she tells them that they go to live with Jesus. About how, when one kid ate an unknown quantity of fruit on a supermarket expedition, she offered to weigh him and pay for everything over 53 Ibs. About why it is all right to store useless leftovers in the refrigerator: "Garbage, if it's made right, takes a full week." About how young mothers want desperately to talk to someone who isn't teething, and the woeful results when they try to generate conversation with those lumps, their husbands, by asking, " 'What kind of a day did you have dear?' One husband reportedly answered by kicking the dog, another went pale and couldn't find words, another bit his necktie in half . . ."

This is classic Bombeck, the wild exaggeration compressed into the stinging one-liner that only slightly overstates the awfulness of the truth. You don't think husbands and kids are that bad? Listen, let me tell you about bad. "After 30 years of marriage, I felt like a truss in a drugstore window." You think that's-overstated? Let me tell you what it's like to be a working mother, "racing around the kitchen in a pair of bedroom slippers, trying to quick-thaw a chop under each armpit . . ." Shared responsibilities? "Transporting children is my husband's 26th favorite thing; it comes somewhere between eating lunch in a tearoom and dropping a bowling ball on his foot." Listen, let me tell you. . .

Trench warfare of this kind is waged not against men and kids, but against loneliness and self-pity. The quick, hit-'em-again-with-another-joke style fits the desperate nature of the combat. The young mother who reads it may have a degree in psychology from Michigan State, but as she cleans up after the puppy while trying to separate two children who are fighting over a linty piece of bubble gum, she may not be in the mood for compound-complex sentences. She may smile over a column by Art Buchwald, the master of the discovered absurdity, or one of Russell Baker's elegantly sane demonstrations that the world is crazy. But if she enlists in an army, it is likely to be Bombeck's. Am I really down on the kitchen floor with an old pair of Jockey shorts doing this? Yes, and there's Bombeck with pork chops under her arms. Such realizations (epiphanies, a James Joyce scholar would call them) explain Bombeck's syndication in those 900 papers, the wild success of her seven books, and reader loyalty that does not stop short of fanaticism. No doubt they also explain her eight-year run on Good Morning America, where her appearances are consistently cheerful but not so sharp or funny as her columns. Bombeck's fans want Bombeck, and they are prepared to excuse home movies.

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