"I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order"
About this Quote
Self-deprecation is Bombeck's stealth weapon, and she wields it here to puncture the prestige of "serious" journalism. "Straight items" is newsroom shorthand for sober, objective reporting; calling herself "terrible" at it isn't confession so much as a quiet refusal to pretend that neutrality is the highest literary virtue. The joke lands because it treats death - the most solemn beat imaginable - as an organizational problem. If the only thing she could make people do was "die in alphabetical order", then her real talent isn't for commanding facts but for arranging them, taming chaos with a filing system and a punchline.
The mother tag sharpens the subtext. It gives the barb a domestic source, not an editor's reprimand, which is classic Bombeck: the authority figure is the family, the newsroom's hierarchies swapped for kitchen-table judgment. It also hints at class and gendered expectations. Women writers were often steered toward "human interest" and away from hard news; Bombeck flips that slight into a comedic credential. If the gatekeepers want straightness, she'll offer something better: a voice that admits the artifice.
There's cultural context in the alphabetical order gag, too. Obituaries are ritualized writing, a genre with templates and euphemisms, where individuality gets flattened by convention. Bombeck's line exposes that flattening. People become names in a column, and the best you can do is sort them. Her intent isn't to trivialize death; it's to mock the machinery that tries to make it orderly - and to claim humor as a more honest response than faux gravitas.
The mother tag sharpens the subtext. It gives the barb a domestic source, not an editor's reprimand, which is classic Bombeck: the authority figure is the family, the newsroom's hierarchies swapped for kitchen-table judgment. It also hints at class and gendered expectations. Women writers were often steered toward "human interest" and away from hard news; Bombeck flips that slight into a comedic credential. If the gatekeepers want straightness, she'll offer something better: a voice that admits the artifice.
There's cultural context in the alphabetical order gag, too. Obituaries are ritualized writing, a genre with templates and euphemisms, where individuality gets flattened by convention. Bombeck's line exposes that flattening. People become names in a column, and the best you can do is sort them. Her intent isn't to trivialize death; it's to mock the machinery that tries to make it orderly - and to claim humor as a more honest response than faux gravitas.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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