Book Review: Laughing All the Way

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: Laughing All the Way


Author: Barbara Howar

Publisher: Stein & Day

ISBN: 0-8128-1539-4

Length: 288 pages of text

Quote: "I have outdistanced even politicians in my race toward the ridiculous. I wanted to make my mistakes at the top and I have."

As I read Laughing All the Way, it occurred to me that Barbara Howar's manuscript must have somehow swapped titles with one of Florence King's books. Florence King (no relation) had me "laughing all the way" with her memoir about growing up in Virginia and going to college in Mississippi...while Barbara Howar's memoir really could be called the "confessions of a failed Southern lady."

In the British system, where "lady" has a precise meaning, Barbara Howar would have qualified as a gentlewoman (some property had been in her family for a long time). In American usage, where "lady" was unofficially reassigned the slang meaning of "female with good manners and a good moral character," Laughing All the Way describes exactly how and when Howar fell short. It's not only that she confesses to blots on her reputation in the areas of chastity and loyalty; it's that, in describing her sins, she continues to wallow in them.

She doesn't even renounce the trivial sin of snobbery, displayed, albeit harmlessly, in this book. "Howar," with a long O and a short A, was her husband's Middle Eastern name. She kept the name after discarding the husband. She was fussy about the way it was pronounced...unless it was misread as "Howard," the name of a more influential Anglo-American family to which she does not belong. Of course, in the present century, one can only sigh for the bygone etiquette that forced even satirists, even after Barbara Howar had confessed to adultery, to pronounce "Howar" with two distinct syllables.

What she does well, in this book, is explain why the career women of the 1960s and 1970s needed a political movement. She documents gender discrimination as it was practiced against women who were abundantly qualified for their careers. She does not attempt to claim that the women who encountered discrimination on the job had prepared themselves for promotion in the same ways their male colleagues did; she documents how and why it was difficult for them to do so.

Another thing she does well is take responsibility for her sins. She doesn't blame Mr. Howar for the fact that she got bored with him, got interested in another man, and got caught, although she does complain about the people who feel that marriages ought to survive times of boredom. She doesn't blame President Johnson for the setbacks in her career after the "big break" she got during his administration. Lady Bird, Lynda Bird, and Luci Baines Johnson are accused of being "not real Southerners," but that was something North Carolinians, like Virginians, had been saying before they ever heard of the LBJ family; even when it was part of the Confederacy, Texas was Texas.

By the end of this memoir, although she's still young, Howar makes it easy to see how Joyce and David Susskind got the idea of casting her as a sort of prototype to "Angry Alice" in the Dilbert cartoons, the acid relief to Joyce Susskind's sweet image. Although Howar describes their show as "exploitation of women," her examples fit precisely into the pattern of Canadian/U.S. rivalry in which Canadian game players attempt to characterize the United States as a big disorderly mannerless mess. The only way U.S. citizens ever score any points in this game is of course to be excruciatingly nice, even charitable, toward our frostbitten friends. Howar wasn't paid to do this on the show, but shows that she hadn't even thought of doing it in the memoir...and so Laughing All the Way ends with a bit of a whimper.

So, it's not very funny, and it's not an especially uplifting memoir, but it does shed some light on what real people were doing in the 1960s. (You always knew there was more going on than the miniskirts and rock music.) If you're interested in research beyond the headline news and pop culture of the period, you need this book.