Erma Bombeck, stand-up comedian

March 19, 2024 4:01 PM

I don't know if the name Erma Bombeck means anything these days. For decades she epitomized a middle America observational kind of humor that was present in a lot of magazines about suburban life. While most of her material was written, she did put out one comedy album: The Family That Plays Together (Gets On Each Other's Nerves) [YT playlist, 1977]. I don't know if we have any equivalent voice in America today and maybe not all the humor works today, but this is a historical document that I got on vinyl from the Columbia House Record Club, and I'm happy to share it here today.
posted by hippybear (34 comments total)

I think an awful lot about the book title When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home, considering I've never read it. It's a wonderful piece of writing in one sentence.
posted by knile at 4:09 PM on March 19 [11 favorites]

My mom had “The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank” and “If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?” on her bookshelf when I was a kid growing up; I read ‘em.
posted by whatevernot at 4:19 PM on March 19 [28 favorites]

Erma Bombeck walked so a million bloggers could run.
posted by pantarei70 at 4:28 PM on March 19 [61 favorites]

She was our commencement speaker at my small midwestern college in 1988, and we were furious when we found out. We thought she was going to do a whiny "oh these kids" speech. Instead, she was warm and thoughtful and sentimental. She spoke to us about the uncertainty of adulthood and to our parents about how to let us fly, and it was lovely. Thanks for bringing back that happy memory!
posted by Sweetie Darling at 4:33 PM on March 19 [55 favorites]

Erma Bombeck walked so a million bloggers could run.

Honestly relistening to it today the delivery patter rhythms I'm most reminded of is Ellen. I don't know if Ellen ever heard this album but the echoes and rhymes are pretty strong. Subject matter quite different, however.
posted by hippybear at 4:37 PM on March 19 [1 favorite]

I was a weird kid who devoured almost everything in the humor section at my public library, and I loved Erma Bombeck’s books even though her perspective as a middle aged mom was pretty different from mine as a 12 year old nerd boy.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:35 PM on March 19 [38 favorites]

I remember her columns from reading them when I was growing up. She was an acute observer of suburban life, and she was very, very funny.

Don’t make assumptions based on the stereotype of a suburban woman of a certain time and place: she was smart, worked on the ERA, wrote bestsellers, and made a good living from her writing.

Whenever I see her name, it makes me smile and think about happy times back in the day. Sadly, I see it mostly in the crossword since her first name contains so many useful letters.
posted by AMyNameIs at 5:36 PM on March 19 [29 favorites]

I don't know if we have any equivalent voice in America today

Maybe Jenny Lawson?
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 5:43 PM on March 19 [7 favorites]

My mom had Aunt Erma’s Cope Book when I was a kid. Though I wasn’t the intended audience I thought it was pretty funny.
posted by non canadian guy at 6:00 PM on March 19 [3 favorites]

Incidentally, "the Pope or Paul Harvey" is my new sockpuppet name.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:20 PM on March 19 [2 favorites]

I loved her books back when I was in middle school. Still have my paperback copies!
posted by WithWildAbandon at 6:26 PM on March 19 [1 favorite]

I grew up on Erma Bombeck and Cathy strips, which probably wasn’t a typical elementary school boy’s reading list.

I’d probably be better off today if I had stuck with Erma and never discovered Dave Barry.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 6:59 PM on March 19 [9 favorites]

My mom was a huge fan.

I read so much of her.
posted by Windopaene at 7:25 PM on March 19

Horace Rumpole: exactly! My mom had her books and a 13- or 14-year old boy in the mid-1980s small town California, I found her stories of being a mom in her 30s in early-60s middle-class suburbia to be hilarious.
posted by MattD at 8:06 PM on March 19 [1 favorite]

This is delightful. Put me in the category of knowing the books from my mother and having no idea there was a record. Thank you!
posted by dr_dank at 4:33 AM on March 20 [3 favorites]

From her obit in the LA Times:
"Bombeck’s ability to make everyone join her in laughing about everyday foibles of family life made her a wealthy woman. She was also a generous one. Even before she suffered cancer, she contributed a $1.5-million advance fee and all the proceeds of her 1989 book “I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise” to cancer research. She was awarded the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor in 1990."
posted by evilmomlady at 4:51 AM on March 20 [8 favorites]

The phrase isn't in any of her books that I know of, but nevertheless I'm pretty sure that Erma Bombeck is somehow responsible for my mother's hilarious habit of collectively referring to the rest of us -- me, my 3 siblings, and my father -- as "You People." Boy do I miss that. I will enjoy listening to the album, thank you!
posted by JanetLand at 5:00 AM on March 20 [4 favorites]

My clearest Bombeck-related memory is of me and my mom at the mall; we pass the bookstore, where If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries is on display. I point it out to my mom because the title is funny. She glances at it and grumbles, "Life isn't a bowl of cherries for all of us," thus somehow both demonstrating and missing the joke simultaneously.

(A few years later, because the covers were similar, I got my mom a Barbara Johnson collection--thinking Johnson would be the same sort of homey humor as Bombeck. Ha-HA, whew boy, little did I know. Johnson turned her deep and lasting trauma over having a gay son, into a profitable career on the Christian circuit. While most of her books have sort of silly sub-Bombeck titles meant to drag a grin-like expression across your face, she's also responsible for the book, When Your Child Breaks Your Heart, cashing in on the aforementioned tragedy.)
posted by mittens at 5:32 AM on March 20

Oh boy do I remember reading my mom’s copies! The #1 thing that stuck with me was her gauge for determining if you’re an adult: If there’s something stuck in your garbage disposal, whose job is it to stick their hand in there and get it unstuck? If it’s you, congrats, you’re all grown up.
posted by BlahLaLa at 7:29 AM on March 20 [6 favorites]

My mother too was a huge fan. And I remember how excited she was when 2 of her favorites came together when Carol Burnett stared in The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank film.
posted by terrapin at 8:04 AM on March 20 [3 favorites]

I was a weird kid who devoured almost everything in the humor section at my public library, and I loved Erma Bombeck’s books even though her perspective as a middle aged mom was pretty different from mine as a 12 year old nerd boy.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:35 PM on March 19 [+] [⚑]


Howwwwwwww did you write my exact comment before I did.
posted by escabeche at 8:21 AM on March 20 [9 favorites]

My book group reads a different genre each month, and a few months ago was "humor." We went with Erma Bombeck, whichever of her books you could snag from the library. They've held up surprisingly well.

I'm another person who read all her books at an early age and they've stuck with me. I also think about the passport photo title! Her work is sort of like Doonesbury for me, where I read it too young to get a lot of the jokes but they lodged in my brain anyway and then I would discover the source years or decades later.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:23 AM on March 20 [4 favorites]

> Carol Burnett stared in The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank film

wait what
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:23 AM on March 20 [4 favorites]

wait what

Available, at least in the US, on YouTube.
posted by hanov3r at 8:42 AM on March 20 [2 favorites]

I read everything I could get my hands on as a kid, including the Miss Manners Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior and, of course, all the Erma Bombecks, which I would find in used bookstores while I was also seeking out my Sweet Dreams junior romances, Sweet Valley Highs, and Race Against Time junior thrillers. I even had the book she did with illustrations by Bil Keane. (Mostly drawings of surly teens, which were very funny to me as a twelve-year-old.) I'm not even sure my mom ever read them or how the first ones I discovered got into the house! I haven't read them in forever but I still think of them fondly.
posted by PussKillian at 8:51 AM on March 20 [7 favorites]

Wow, lots of fans who got into Bombeck as kiddos, not just me. Aunt Erma's Cope Book was a favorite. The TV movie, not so much. Thanks for posting this, hippybear, I'll have to give your link a listen.
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 9:32 AM on March 20

Carol Burnett stared in The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank film

With Charles Grodin!
posted by kirkaracha at 10:15 AM on March 20 [1 favorite]

Another old kiddo here who read her books & liked them. (Also all the Phyllis Diller "I Hate to Housekeep!" stuff.) From either Erma or Phyllis I learned you don't HAVE to dust, just don't ever write down the YEAR in in the dust.
posted by Wylie Kyoto at 10:33 AM on March 20 [4 favorites]

Off to go listen.
I was in speech/forensics in high school, and my very first speech was The Second Car 10 Day War.
posted by luckynerd at 12:52 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

That was great. Highly recommended. :)
posted by luckynerd at 2:08 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

EB on the ERA: 'Look, ladies, those 16 little words simply mean one size fits all.' '
posted by brujita at 5:00 PM on March 20

Never read any of her books (my mom was neither a suburban housewife nor into humor), but read her columns in the local paper religiously. A funny, funny lady.
posted by lhauser at 5:59 PM on March 20

Yes somehow or the other her book If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What am I Doing in the Pits? ended up in my parents' bookshelf (neither of them were into observational humour) and I read it as a kid. I remember enjoying her nuclear family mom humour, it made for a safe little world to hang out in. I still remember a piece about her invisible child I. Dunno who was responsible for every breakage or accident in the house.
posted by unicorn chaser at 8:35 AM on March 21

I read at least three of her paperbacks at around age ten because I was stuck at The Lake with the haphazard lake house library. I thought they were pretty damn funny, and I'm pretty sure I read them more than once.
posted by RedEmma at 4:18 PM on March 22