Politics & Power Quote by Erma Bombeck

Bombeck’s punchline lands because it pretends to offer gratitude for civilization, then reveals the absurdly low bar: thank God for pants. National Geographic, especially in the mid-to-late 20th century, was shorthand for “respectable” curiosity about the wider world, delivered on glossy paper to suburban coffee tables. It was also famous for photographs that let American readers peer at distant cultures with a sanctioned kind of gawking. Bombeck exploits that shared reference with a journalist’s timing and a sitcom writer’s sense of what makes people squirm.

The intent isn’t prudishness so much as a comic jab at how quickly “open-minded” consumption turns into embarrassment when the body enters the frame. She’s mocking the viewer’s reflexive discomfort: we congratulate ourselves on being modern, tolerant, educated, and then a bare breast in a magazine makes us reach for the remote. The line also skewers the way Americans domesticate the exotic. National Geographic framed nudity as anthropology, not pornography, yet it still triggered the same cultural tripwires. Bombeck points out that our “luck” is really a preference dressed up as moral progress.

Under the joke is a sly critique of armchair cosmopolitanism. The magazine promises worldly sophistication, but the reader’s takeaway can be as petty as relief that their own norms still rule at home. Bombeck’s genius is to compress that hypocrisy into one polite sentence that sounds like a toast, then detonates like a spit-take.