She-Wits and Funny Persons

By R.Z. Sheppard

Five women who have something in comic

In a new book, Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction Since 1945 (Oxford; $11.95), Literary Critic Josephine Hendin suggests: "One of the great weapons to emerge from the sexual revolution is a devastating she-wit." Hendin finds this biting, mordant humor in such comedians as Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers and Lily Tomlin and in such novelists as Cynthia Buchanan, Alix Kates Shulman and Lois Gould.

A good case can be made for contemporary she-wit; there are also clear historical precedents. Napoleon Bonaparte assessed Madame de Stael's offensive capabilities and concluded: "She has shafts that would hit a man if he were seated on a rainbow." Pioneering American Feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony demonstrated an effective podium wit, but as the years went by, democracy and its wide audiences tended to broaden and coarsen humor. Until recently, male jokes about women as sex toys were broadcast without self-consciousness. Women mirrored their anxieties in popular comedy that dealt with the currying of male vanity. From The Delicatessen Husband (1926) by Florence Guy Seabury:

" 'Taking care of my husband's egotism,' said a frank and modern friend, 'keeping it buttressed to the height where he is happy and self-sufficient is a bigger chore than all I do for my three babies put together.'

" 'Why do it?' an unmarried companion put in.

" 'Because,' said the sophisticated one, 'you've got to bolster them up to make good providers of them. Let them devel op an inferiority complex or a sense of discouragement, and they begin to fail all along the line.'"

The implacable logic of the feminist movement would render this passage patently sexist. What self-respecting man wants to be treated as a security object? Fortunately, the Seabury wit, like Dagwood and Blondie, has dated into harmless nostalgia. But the once chivalric war between the sexes has become balkanized beyond easy definition. Consider the five most successful books of humor published by women in recent months; differing widely in origins and interests, the authors range from Erma Bombeck, queen of suburban frump and the grin-and-bear-it school, to Fran Lebowitz, whose Metropolitan Life is a gallery of freeze-dried urbanities from after-dark Manhattan.

Bombeck's enormous appeal contains no surprises. She has, as market researchers say, great demographics. Her column, At Wit's End, appears in more than? 700 newspapers and is aimed primarily at the millions of housewives whose world turns around car pools, P.T.A. meetings and Tupperware parties.

The basic theme of her new collection, If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries -- What Am I Doing in the Pits? (McGraw-Hill; $7.95), is surviving the daily bombardment of laundry, junk food and evidences of middle age. Bombeck herself has done it, as an Ohio mother of three and wife of a school principal. Now, with her children grown, she lives in a suburb of Phoenix. Bombeck has been called the female Art Buchwald. A better parallel might be Bill Mauldin, the author of World War IIs Willie and Joe cartoons. For at bottom, she views the housewife as society's thankless foot soldier, engaged in countless small battles to preserve the family's besieged traditions and values. Despite her lightness and the overcuteness of her titles (I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression, The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank), she can flash genuine annoyance at the many cons directed at her harried legions.

"One day in a leading magazine, I saw a story called Today's Woman on the Go. At the top of the article was a picture of a well-stacked blonde at a construction site with a group of men around her while she read blueprints to them. I noted her shoes were coordinated with her Gucci yellow hard hat. The second picture showed her in a pair of flowing pajamas standing over the stove stirring her filet-mignon helper (recipe on page 36) while her husband tossed the salad and her children lovingly set the table. It made me want to spit up."

In Not Responsible for Personal Articles (Random House; $7.95), Lois Gould describes how Woman on the Go might actually make it. Her article How to Liberate Your Entire Family, in Your Own Home, Without Cost or Obligation belongs in an anthology of contemporary folk wisdom. "I have finally concluded," writes Gould, "that ours may be the only middle-class family in America to have taken the final revolutionary step toward total liberation. Our children swab their own bathroom! They also swab ours! Indeed, they vacuum the rugs, do the laundry and the grocery shopping, help prepare meals, do all the cleaning up after meals, make their own beds, clean their rooms, dust, sweep and polish surfaces as needed and sew occasional buttons on their father's shirts."

The children are both teen-age boys, and they do not live in a Marine boot camp but in a Manhattan brownstone where their mother writes novels (Such Good Friends, A Sea-Change) and their father practices psychiatry. Theirs is undoubtedly a special case, but Gould's principles of shared responsibility have broad applications and roots that go back to the 19th century farm.

Gould is an active feminist, and the best pieces in her book are lively exposes of the double standard. "Unfair Sex at M.I.T.," for example, cuts closest with an informal survey of reaction to the women at M.I.T. who publicly graded their lovers' bedroom proficiencies. "Porn for Women; Women for Porn" demonstrates Gould's considerable ability to explore a complex subject with style and economy. She knows how to relax: "Rolling around half naked on the floor of a mirrored room; performing unnatural acts in unspeakable positions; committing indecent exposure under glaring lights, not to mention the bold stares of hot-eyed strangers." Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour? No. Ms. Gould at a health club.

In Cyra McFadden's affluent San Francisco suburb, a health club is likely to be called a center for human potential. Her book The 'Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County (Knopf; $4.95) is a deadly satire on such pretensions. Its first 30 chapters appeared in Pacific Sun, a weekly in Mill Valley, Calif., where McFadden lives with her husband, a businessman, and teen-age daughter.

The principal characters in this mock soap opera wander aimlessly from body to body and from cliche to cliche in a culture where evil, like perspiration odor, has been banished with squirt-can philosophies. McFadden's cassette ear for the jargon of the "mellow" and "laid back" is faultless: "Reverend Spike Thurston, minister of the Radical Unitarian Church in Terra Linda and active in the Marin Sexual Freedom League, was presiding ... 'Fellow beings,' Thurston began, smiling, 'I'm not here today as a minister but as a member of the community. Not just the community of souls gathered here, not just the community of Mill Valley, but the larger human community which is the cosmos!' "

Although Serial has sold more than 135,000 copies, McFadden, a former English teacher, has not got good reviews from many of her Mill Valley neighbors. Some even see her as a traitor to her class. The plot of Serial may be fiction, but its language is lifted directly from life. Notes McFadden: "My butcher says 'Can you relate to a pork roast?' and a local veterinarian advertises that he can cure joint diseases in dogs with rolfing."

Nora Ephron also gives her subjects plenty of rope before she hangs them. Scribble Scribble (Knopf; $7.95), a gathering of her journalism criticism for Esquire, allows a number of well-known writers and editors to twist slowly in their own wind. Ephron is an excellent parodist. On a famous publisher and his companion, an author of best-selling pop psychology: "Clay Filter snapped awake and nodded comprehendingly. The truth, though, was that he could never figure out what she was talking about when she went on in this way. He knew it sold magazines, and books, and that someone must understand it, but he knew he didn't, and he wasn't sure what he could do about it if he did."

One of Ephron's funniest pieces is not about a journalist but about her cousin, the owner of a Bronx carpet store. He may seem somewhat out of place beside Russell Baker, Bob Haldeman and The odore H. White, but Cousin Arthur Ephron delivers the best line when he as sures the author that the New York-based department-store chain EJ. Korvettes does not stand for Eight Jewish Korean War Veterans.

A little bit of this sort of humor goes a long way, a lesson that the gifted Fran Lebowitz has yet to learn. Metropolitan Life (Button; $8.50) blitzes the reader with such lines as "Food gives real meaning to dining room furniture . . . Children are rarely in the position to lend one a truly interesting sum of money ... If God had meant for everything to happen at once, he would not have invented desk calendars . . . Sleep is death without the responsibility." It is a foppish wit that is very conscious of taste, class and sexual pre dilections, but Lebowitz herself remains an elusive target. Her easy cynicism and airy misanthropy have no fixed center, and though many of her riffs are spontaneously funny, too many others are arch and heavy with intention. In the end, Metropolitan Life seems like one long game show -- What's My One-Liner?

The one quality all these authors seem to share is a traditionalism, be it about family values, the use of language or styles of music and clothing. Beyond this, it is increasingly difficult to tell a she-wit from simply a funny person .

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