Barbara Bennett’s Comic Visions, Female Voices, tells of the female side to southern humor. For generations humor has been a big part of the lives of southerners. Humor has bee incorporated into work, play and education. Unfortunately, until the 1970’s, women in the South were not encouraged to be outspoken in public, let alone show that they might have a sense of humor. This led to women joking around in their own private spheres of the home, like the kitchen.

Female authors, throughout history, have been fighting for the freeing of women’s expression. They have used comedy to further the fight and many made breakthrough by getting women’s issues out there humorously. By making people laugh first, many authoresses felt they could then make people see the underlying issues and do something to change the problems. Ann Stephens, Erma Bombeck, Regina Barreca, and many others made immeasurable contributions to the movement that enabled women to express themselves more freely. By allowing people to laugh at the men they wrote about, they allowed people to observe the injustices women lived and to break free of what women were permitted to say and not to say in public.

Erma Bombeck made her laughs come out of the every day life of a woman, usually her own. She would make the smallest incidents hilarious and by doing this make the larger issues all that more important. For instance, in one of her writing she is making fun of her husband’s obsession with conserving electricity. She writes, “He has dedicated his entire life to flipping off light switches giving rise to his theory that ‘It is better to break your leg in the darkness than to curse the light bills.’” This humorous description makes the larger issues she addresses stand out more. When she wrote about parenting, and motherhood’s difficulties over that of fatherhood, she writes of God and an angel discussing the creation of the first mother. Bombeck writes,

“‘There’s a leak,’ she [angel] pronounced. ‘I told you that you were trying to put too much into this model.’ ‘It’s not a leak,’ said the Lord. ‘It’s a tear.’ ‘What’s it for?’ ‘It’s for joy, sadness, disappointment, pain, loneliness and pride.’ “You are a genius,’ said the angel. The Lord looked somber. ‘I didn’t put it there.’

Bombeck goes on to say that the mother has three sets of eyes, six pairs of hands and “run on black coffee and leftovers.” She also elaborates that a mother “heals herself when she is sick… can feed a family of six on one pound of hamburger meat… and can get a nine-year-old to stand under a shower.” This humorous interpretation of motherhood shows all that mothers must do to keep a family going, but never once is a man mentioned in her tale; the woman does all this alone. This shows the inequalities that a woman deals with in her everyday life through comedy. By doing this, Bombeck brings attention to the dissimilarities in women’s lives and that of

Some topics in this essay:
Erma Bombeck, Female Voices, Change Women, Ann Stephens, Harrison Tyler, O’Connor Whitcher, Voice Identity”, Regina Barreca, Miriam Whitcher, Valerie Sayers, express themselves, female comedians, express themselves freely, women fought, themselves freely, religion sex, southern women, comedy humor, women allowed, visions female voices, female voices, comic visions female, women’s liberation, male form humor, freeing women’s expression,