Books: She-Wits and Funny Persons

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Five women who have something in comic

In a new book, Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction Since 1945 (Oxford; $11.95), Literary Critic Josephine Hendin suggests: "One of the great weapons to emerge from the sexual revolution is a devastating she-wit." Hendin finds this biting, mordant humor in such comedians as Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers and Lily Tomlin and in such novelists as Cynthia Buchanan, Alix Kates Shulman and Lois Gould.

A good case can be made for contemporary she-wit; there are also clear historical precedents. Napoleon Bonaparte assessed Madame de Stael's offensive capabilities and concluded: "She has shafts that would hit a man if he were seated on a rainbow." Pioneering American Feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony demonstrated an effective podium wit, but as the years went by, democracy and its wide audiences tended to broaden and coarsen humor. Until recently, male jokes about women as sex toys were broadcast without self-consciousness. Women mirrored their anxieties in popular comedy that dealt with the currying of male vanity. From The Delicatessen Husband (1926) by Florence Guy Seabury:

" 'Taking care of my husband's egotism,' said a frank and modern friend, 'keeping it buttressed to the height where he is happy and self-sufficient is a bigger chore than all I do for my three babies put together.'

" 'Why do it?' an unmarried companion put in.

" 'Because,' said the sophisticated one, 'you've got to bolster them up to make good providers of them. Let them devel op an inferiority complex or a sense of discouragement, and they begin to fail all along the line.'"

The implacable logic of the feminist movement would render this passage patently sexist. What self-respecting man wants to be treated as a security object? Fortunately, the Seabury wit, like Dagwood and Blondie, has dated into harmless nostalgia. But the once chivalric war between the sexes has become balkanized beyond easy definition. Consider the five most successful books of humor published by women in recent months; differing widely in origins and interests, the authors range from Erma Bombeck, queen of suburban frump and the grin-and-bear-it school, to Fran Lebowitz, whose Metropolitan Life is a gallery of freeze-dried urbanities from after-dark Manhattan.

Bombeck's enormous appeal contains no surprises. She has, as market researchers say, great demographics. Her column, At Wit's End, appears in more than? 700 newspapers and is aimed primarily at the millions of housewives whose world turns around car pools, P.T.A. meetings and Tupperware parties.