Never, under any circumstances,
take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.
Never tell a woman that you didn’t realize she was pregnant
unless you’re certain that she is.
Despite their popularity, I now regard these as orphan quotations, a term for anonymously authored observations that are attached to famous people to give them stature. The last one appears to be a paraphrase of something Barry wrote in a 1997 piece called “25 Things I Have Learned in 50 Years”: “You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.”
If Dave Barry was America’s most popular male humorist in the final decades of the twentieth century, then Erma Bombeck was his female counterpart. After graduating as an English major from the University of Dayton in 1949, she married her college sweetheart, Bill Bombeck, and took a job as a full-time reporter at the local Dayton Journal Herald. She had worked as a part-time copy girl at the paper since the age of fifteen, and at sixteen achieved her first great journalistic success when the paper printed an interview she did with Shirley Temple. For the next several years, she wrote primarily for the women’s section of the paper, occasionally landing interviews with visiting celebrities, like Eleanor Roosevelt and Mamie Eisenhower. She also made her first stab at a humorous housekeeping column, which she titled “Operation Dishrag.”
In the early years of the marriage, Bombeck and husband Bill tried to have children, but without success. In 1953, after a family physician told them that a pregnancy was highly unlikely, the couple adopted a baby girl. Bombeck did what most women of the era were doing: she quit her job and embarked on a new career as a full- time mom. Two years later, the woman who was not supposed to be able to conceive gave birth to a son, and three years after that, another son was born. From 1953 to 1964, she never worked outside of her home. But she never lost her desire to write. Almost every night, after the children were put to bed, she could be found in her bedroom, hunched over a makeshift writing desk crafted out of a wooden plank placed on top of cinder blocks.
In 1964, Bombeck began writing a weekly humor column titled “At Wit’s End” for a suburban newspaper just outside of Dayton. She was paid only three dollars per column, but it was a way to dip her toe back into the journalistic waters. When her old bosses at the Dayton Journal Herald learned of her new writing efforts, they offered her $50 a week for two columns. Bombeck, who would have written the columns without remuneration, was elated. But she wasn’t prepared for what was about to happen. Three weeks after her first Journal Herald column, the paper arranged a syndication deal that placed the column in thirty-six major U.S. newspapers. Almost overnight, the little-known Dayton woman became a national celebrity, as millions of American women savored her wry and witty reflections on being a wife, mother, and homemaker. By 1966, she was receiving an honorarium of $15,000 for a single lecture.
Over the next three decades, until her premature death in 1996 at age sixty-nine (from complications after a kidney transplant), Bombeck became the most popular female humorist in America. She wrote over 4,000 columns that, at the height of her popularity, were syndicated in over 900 newspapers worldwide, capturing an estimated readership of over thirty million people. Beginning with At Wit’s End in 1967, collections of her columns were published in numerous bestselling books.
Bombeck had a gift for hilarious one-liners—especially ones that presented life lessons or rules to live by. Sometimes, like Dave Barry, she offered what appeared to be a serious warning, and then gave it a twist:
Never be in a hurry to terminate a marriage.
Remember, you may need this man/woman to finish a sentence.
Never go to a class reunion pregnant.
They will think that’s all you have been doing since you graduated.
At other times, she offered straight-out witty neverisms:
Never accept a drink from a urologist.
Never order food in excess of your body weight.
Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.
Never have more children than you have car windows.
Never loan your car to someone to whom you have given birth.
Another American writer with a fondness for neverisms is P. J. O’Rourke. Raised in a conservative Republican family in Ohio, O’Rourke caused his parents more than a little angst when he became a hippie while at Miami University (Ohio) in the late 1960s. He carried his left-leaning political orientation with him to Johns Hopkins University, where he earned his M.A. in English. In the 1970s, he honed his skills as a writer and satirist at the National Lampoon, where he served in a number of roles, including managing editor. As the 1970s ended and O’Rourke approached his thirties, he experienced a profound transformation of his political orientation, ultimately adopting a libertarian philosophy and, to the horror of his old friends, even becoming a Republican.
O’Rourke embarked on a freelance writing career in 1981, producing articles for such magazines as Playboy, Harper’s, and Vanity Fair. He also began to work on books of humor, beginning with Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People (1983). A spoof of etiquette guides, Modern Manners is a tour de force of neverisms. Of several dozen that appeared in the book, here are my favorites:
Never fight an inanimate object.
Never stab anyone with a gravy ladle.
Never wear anything that panics the cat.
Never hit anyone below the belt,
particularly a black one earned in karate.
Never hit anyone from behind
(people should be kicked from behind).
Never strike anyone so old, small,
or weak that verbal abuse would have sufficed.
Never steal anything so small that you’ll have to go to an
unpleasant city jail for it instead of a minimum security federal tennis prison.
In the fashion of Dave Barry and Erma Bombeck, O’Rourke also began many of his cautionary warnings in what appeared to be a serious way:
