For many years, Elouise Bell has explored the range of the personal essay, trying it on like a body-suit, finding where it bends, where it stretches, where it fits best, where it's a bit loose and wrinkled. Most of these trials have been undertaken for network magazine. To it, for its deadlines, we owe an immense debt of gratitude; without them, the tongue of this Bell might never have rung so many changes on the form.

And such changes! There is the voice of "When Nice Ain't so Nice" warning us of the danger to our society of suppressing our feelings, especially anger. There is the backward unmasking of our Sunday rituals in "The Meeting," loosing a friction of nervous laughter that scrubs away the local anaesthetic which lets us sleep through Sacrament (and other meetings). There is the clever update of one-upmanship in "Power Ploys" lingering like a message on an answering machine, to remind us each time we take it up how phony are our pretensions. (And a reminder in "Three for the Holidays" of how empty our post-tensions are.)

In all these essays—wry, funny, sly, outrageous, clever, witty, dry-eyed, in memoriam—Elouise Bell releases the tensions that we all feel, sometimes with gales of raucous laughter, sometimes with punctures to our pride, sometimes with a clean surgical swipe. The tickling we feel in the aftermath is the itch of healing, the healing of the wound made by that large spear.

BYU Today, Richard H. Cracroft
Let me cheer an exultant "hosanna" over Elouise M. Bell's collection of short, Association for Mormon Letters prize-winning essays, Only When I Laugh, gleaned from her network column. Wry, warm, human, funny, poignant, Professor Bell's essays touch us where we live. Venture in; you'll be glad you did.

Provo Daily Herald, Dani Eyer Davis
In reading Elouise Bell's Only When I Laugh, one must never confuse soberness with seriousness. The reader will just recover from a satisfying belly laugh and wipe away tears when she or he realizes that underlying Bell's humor is often a very real issue.

There are, of course, many varied approaches to social criticism: protest, withdrawal, denial, confrontation, grumbling, etc., but none more effective than humor. As Mark Twain wrote in The Mysterious Stranger: "Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand."

We can therefore be grateful for the publication in one volume of Elouise Bell's essays which have appeared for years in network magazine. Bell has the all-too-rare ability to take a matter that has been blissfully ignored and stand it on edge, walk around it, study it from all angles, perceive the problem and then render it, with humor, to the reader for inspection. Not unlike the Far Side's Gary Larson, she fights subtle cultural inanities by exaggerating their excesses and painting them in colors of absurdity.

In one essay Bell brings to light the discomfort many feel when having to constantly acknowledge one's marital status on virtually every form or questionnaire (single-married-divorced-widowed). She asks "How do you answer a question that wants a one-word response to 'family status?' What do you say? 'Intact?' 'Dispersed?' How do you define your 'status' in your family? 'Barely tolerated?'Bell has the reader smiling and snickering and yet, as was all too clear in the recent local congressional race, attacking or justifying someone's 'family status' is serious business.

An English professor and associate dean of Honors and General Education at Brigham Young University, Bell is able to articulate for us our passing impressions and once unburied they are left open for our own scrutiny.

For example, anyone with a sense of humor will laugh while reading about a gender role reversal in an LDS Sunday meeting setting; but the reader may also experience some degree of pain as it dawns on them for the first or 50th time that maybe what's laughable—isn't. In her essay, "The Meeting," men are "hurriedly urging children into pews, settling quarrels and trying to arrange the seating—juggling the paraphernalia" and a woman runs the church meeting "flanked by two others: a slender, dark-suited woman of about 30—and a women of perhaps 60 who appears totally unflappable." She makes the announcements: ". . . our lovely brethren are collecting empty one-quart oil cans, to be used by the group in making special Christmas projects . . . Next, we want to remind you of Education Week . . . Sister Enid Hemming is speaking on 'The Gnostic Scrolls and Our Concept of Spirit Translation.' Brother Terry Joe Jones will repeat last year's popular series on 'Being a More Masculine You.' . . . [and] . . . Next week is a big one for the younger teens in our congregation: the Beehive class is going to kayak down the Green River . . . and the deacons will be here at home, helping to fold and stamp the ward newsletter."

Some essays in Bells' book provide purely comic relief (the proliferation of zucchini, the endless search for scotch tape) and others are poignant and without humor (a tribute to Algie Ballif); but for the most part there exists a delightful combination of levity and gravity, for under the humorist Elouise Bell lies the wary observer, the social critic, whose interest in the serious side of life allows her to pinpoint the absurdities of her culture with alarming accuracy. Funny? Yes. Painful? Only when she laughs.

The Deseret News, Susan Lyman-Whitney
Take heart, oh lovers of good writing. The art of the essay is not lost. In Only When I Laugh, Elouise Bell proves her skill in 36 short essays, most of which originally appeared in network magazine.

Bell is a professor of English at Brigham Young University. She finds humor in ward meetings, the IWY convention, growing zucchini and growing up "nice." She writes a eulogy for Algie Ballif. She writes of the simple food she remembers from her childhood. Her topics are especially meaningful for Utahns and for women. Her tone is even-handed, often conciliatory, never mean. "Why do women not have pockets and why should we want them?" she asks in an essay titled "Pocket Politics."

"We want them because they are freeing. They free the hands, enabling us to stride through the world unfettered. With both hands free we can pull open a heavy door with some grace and ease instead of going through a vaudeville routine. We can grab a railing or swing onto a bus. We can catch ourselves more easily if we stumble; we can shake hands or embrace someone without a juggling act. Obviously the arms are meant to swing free as the human being walks, so as to provide grace and balance. What a 15 pound handbag does to that balance we all know too well. . . .

"I am tired of putting down a good pen and then, when I miss it, spending 20 minutes hunting for it. I am tired of not having small change on me when I need it. I want equal pockets. . . .

"Do you think we could push manufacturers on the subject? Working pockets for working women, or some rallying cry like that? I say working pockets because I've had too many close encounters with ornamental pockets that immediately fall to pieces from overuse—like holding a Kleenex or a paperclip." Even more freeing than pockets is Bell's insight. This much is clear from her writing: She is a woman who strides through the world unfettered. Unfettered and chuckling. In Only When I Laugh, she invites us to walk with her and smile.

Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Miriam B. Murphy
A student of Zen Buddhism meditated daily on koans assigned by the Zen master. None of his insights impressed the master until one day, after years of thought about these puzzles, the student timidly began his exposition of a koan and then burst into uncontrollable laughter, at which point the Zen master clapped him on the back and shouted his congratulations.

Laughter is not necessarily the appropriate response to every koan or to all of life's mysteries and travails, but Elouise Bell, like the Zen master, leads us to suspect that laughter may be one of the great liberating forces in the universe. Indeed, I laugh, there I am (which Bell may well have coined) is probably a more useful precept than that originated by Réné Descartes. From Descartes' time to our own, the world had been awash with the weighty thoughts of competing philosophies—many of them ridiculous and some downright dangerous. Imagine; for example, how different history might have been had Elouise or an equally gifted wit cut her teeth on a turgid copy of Das Kapital when it first plopped off the press.

The thirty-six entries included in Only When I Laugh cover a range of cultural topics from Z (for zucchini) to C (for Christmas). Many were originally published in Bell's network column. Their collection in book form is a stroke of good luck for those interested in literary history, because her work represents a rare genre in Utah and Mormon letters. Utah has poets aplenty, historians, writers of song lyrics and fiction in its many forms, and even playwrights and philosophers—but where are the humorists (other than cartoonists)? Possibly the late Pulitzer Prize winner and one-time Utahn Phyllis McGinley fits in this niche, as does the late Salt Lake Tribune columnist Dan Valentine. Really, though, the field isn't overpopulated.

Bell's humor is disarming rather than armor-piercing; moreover, it usually directs the reader to a closer examination of life and the cultural norms we live by. "The Mug-wump" asks us to look again at the extremist positions of the clenched-fist feminist and the don't-you-dare-call-me-one-of-them camps. Bell engages the reader in a dialogue that gently restores equilibrium by dispelling the polarizing notion that true-believer zeal is superior to a more open, less vehement view. In the context of Only When I Laugh, we could call it the Elouisean mean.

"The Meeting" is classic satire. It describes a typical Sunday morning church service in a familiar format of announcements, music, and talks; but in this instance all the key players are women—not in a one-time role reversal—but as the obvious norm. When these women speak, pat and patronizing phrases about the opposite sex tumble unawares from their lips: Next weekend is a big one for the younger teens in our congregation: the Beehive class is going to kayak down the Green River, under the direction of Sister Lynn Harrison. And as I understand it, the deacons will be here at home, helping to fold and stamp the ward newsletter.

In the Young Men's meeting tonight, the boys will have something special to look forward to—a panel of Laurels from the stake will discuss "What We Look for in Boys We Date." Here your big chance boys! (p. 13)

"Call Me Indian Summer" is a spoof of the idea that each person's coloring relates to one of the four seasons and that cosmetic and clothing colors should be chosen with that in mind. Bell suggests that four is not enough, recalling "an aunt . . . who was clearly Ground Hog's Day" and "a friend in Logan [who] is the Fourth of July" (p. 99).

Most readers will not be disciplined enough to place Only When I Laugh on a bedside table for thirty-six nights of bedtime reading but will keep saying, as I did--just one more chapter before I turn out the light. So, we must nurture Elouise as we would the rare sego lily (when was the last time you saw one?); her insights and humor are sorely needed.

Feminisms, Valerie Sanders
Elouise Bell is a Mormon feminist, and her book of essays deals with feminism, Mormon-style. If that statement strikes you as slightly oxymoronic, the book will probably drive you nuts. If it doesn't, the book will reassure you that non-politically-correct feminism is alive and well.

The essays in Only When I Laugh are short, humorous and occasionally sentimental. Most originally appeared in network, a magazine published for the feminist community in and around Salt Lake City, Utah. As such, they reflect the concerns of women attempting to coordinate membership in a conservative community, if not necessarily a conservative church, with the belief that all women deserve the right to make their own decisions about their own lives. One essay, "The Mug-wump," deals with this particular contradiction. According to Bell, a "mug-wump" is a person who sits "with 'mug' on one side of the fence and 'wump' on the other" (4). Rather than actually sitting on fences, though, Bell asserts that mug-wumps spend most of their time leaping over fences, escaping pursuit by those activists on both sides who insist that only people who swear total allegiance to one side or the other can be trusted. She suggests that mug-wumps are not traitors, but rather communicators. They can help one side to understand the needs and ideals of the other side, thus sowing the seeds of coalition between diverse groups of women who are working toward similar goals.

Most of Bell's essays, however, reflect on less political themes. She talks about families and friends, pets and power-napping, Christmas and clothing without pockets. The essays are about feminism in everyday life in Utah. If they are not on the cutting edge of feminist theory, they are a gentle reminder that in spite of our different lifestyles and beliefs, all of us who claim feminism for ourselves do share at least a few common experiences and goals.

The essays in Only When I Laugh are not of consistent quality, and because of their original place of publication, most assume a certain amount of familiarity with Mormon culture and the Intermountain West. However, for light reading, a glimpse into a different feminist perspective, or maybe to introduce feminism to a skeptical audience, Only When I Laugh is a useful book.

Jackson Hole News, Liz Monson
From zucchini to men with Don Johnson beards, Elouise M. Bell's first book, Only When I Laugh, says something about everything, and then some. The book cover depicts Bell, a Brigham Young University professor and honored journalist, laughing. The author often breaks into guffaws large enough to engage her entire audience.

The book, however, deals with varied issues, some of which are decidedly not comical. There may be some truth to the idea of teaching with laughter, as Bell spins her webs of humorous anecdotes into a more serious framework.

In an essay about the American Sex Goddess, Bell writes, "Maybe when American women refuse any longer to buy into the youth cult, when we don't giggle or lie or hesitate about our ages, when we claim our own power, use it finely and confidently, to heal and to grow, maybe then we will get scripts and movies that do justice to the Crone, especially if, along with all these achievements, we have more women writing, directing, producing." It is because Bell is so willing and able to laugh at herself before she pokes fun at anything around her, that the essays are such a success.

It seems that Bell has a comment for everything, including the upcoming holiday season. "You try it. Try buying American, checking to make sure no endangered animal has given its life for your present, making sure the toys you buy for kids won't lodge in their throats or trigger latent criminal violence, double-checking to see that your gifts aren't sexist, Freudian, or sub-consciously hostile."

New Landings, Shelley Haddock
When Elouise Bell published her first collection of essays last year, Utah retailers could barely keep the book in stock. Only When I Laugh is now in its second printing. Not surprisingly, when the Association for Mormon Letters met in Salt Lake City recently to hand out awards for the best in Mormon literature, the winning prize for essays went to Elouise Bell.

Bell, associate dean of general and honors education at Brigham Young University, writes a monthly column for network magazine. Her most popular essays were brought together in Only When I Laugh.

An admirer of the late activist Algie Ballif, Bell is similarly concerned with tolerance and social equality. She attacks what she views as the pressures to be "nice" and champions the virtues not only of patriotism but "matriotism," the devotion to Mother Earth.

Bell's reviewers have been united in their praise of her wit and penetrating commentary. "Elouise Bell relentlessly writes about minutiae, from zucchini to pantyhose," says Ann Poore, Salt Lake Tribune. "But she does it with such witty intelligence, not to mention contagious exuberance, that one tends to read compulsively through the 36 essays in Only When I Laugh—like eating popcorn at a movie."

The Salt Lake Tribune, Ann Poore
Elouise Bell relentlessly writes about minutiae, from zucchini to pantyhose. But she does it with such witty intelligence, not to mention contagious exuberance, that one tends to read compulsively through the 36 essays in Only When I Laugh—like eating popcorn at a movie.

It's probably more rewarding, however, to savor each (often ridiculous) kernel. It was easier to do when most of these pieces first appeared, rationed monthly in network magazine. Bell writes extremely well. Indeed, her regular column has received first place for "excellence in journalism" form the Society of Professional Journalists.

Bell tackles serious topics with a thoughtful smile, particularly those dealing with feminism and the Mormon Church, like "The Meeting" and "Matriotism." Her satirical voice will be appreciated even by gentile readers, though some may be a bit bewildered. (Just what is the "face-card dilemma" that "card-loving Mormons" face?) This isn't my idea of bedtime reading, but put Bell's book on your night stand anyway. She is a joy in the morning, just before dealing with pantyhose and a perpetual lack of pockets.

The Ogden Standard-Examiner, Janelle Biddinger
Mary had always been afraid to speak her thoughts. She had sought safety in silence until, it seemed, her own ideas had drifted away. But one day, the story goes, Mary found her voice. And for the first time, she felt free.

Professor Elouise Bell finishes the short story, and a quiet settles over the college classroom. Only whispery rustles sound as the 15 or so students look up from their books, the pages open to the story of Mary.

Then Bell jumps up from the circle of chairs. "That reminds me of a line I love so much I have to put it on the board," she says. Chalk dust swirling, she pauses before the slate to scratch out: "Let me listen to me and not to them." That statement originated with writer Gertrude Stein, but it may well be the creed for Bell, a Brigham Young University English professor and associate dean. A Mormon and long-time feminist, Bell's journey along that precarious path has been so determined that, as a columnist for the Utah women's magazine network, she's become a bridge of sorts: Mormon to non-Mormon, conservative to radical.

A collection of her essays, Only When I Laugh, was published this month by Signature Books. Bell has taught at BYU since "Mount Timpanogos was a bump" (that's 1958, for those who are counting); and as a result, the classroom is "where I have a lot of my ego invested," she says. "I get a lot of my self-identity out of being a good teacher."

But to those whose blood isn't BYU blue, Bell is perhaps best known as a humorist—a talent that prompted former network editor Karen Shepherd in 1978 to offer a Bell a monthly forum for a column. "Writing that actually provokes people to laughter is so rare in this world that almost no one can do it well," says Shepherd, a newly elected Utah legislator. "And Elouise can do it with great regularity."

Since then, Bell has tackled such Utah institutions as zucchini: "I know friends who greet the announcement of a new zucchini recipe with a great deal more excitement than they gave to the discovery of cold fusion," she writes. "What am I saying? I know newborn babies who don't get the welcome a new zucchini recipe gets!"

And she's commiserated with every girl's "passage into pantyhose," not to mention her own adult dilemma of having "the hose end and the panty begin before I do, if you see what I mean." But the "humorist" tag is not one Bell cares for. It's too confining, too predictable, too single-minded. "If someone announces you as a humorist, you might as well go to the Comedy Improv and let them take their shots at you there: 'OK, you think you're funny? Prove it to me,'" said Bell during an interview. "The whole thing about humor is the surprise element. If people are anticipating that, it diminishes the serious things you're going to say, and it punctures the balloon of the funny things that might occur."

Shepherd knows well that Bell doesn't consider herself a humorist, but, "I don't know if Charlie Chaplin would have either," she said. "Think about Woody Allen—all of the really amazingly funny people are very serious at heart." Indeed, it was because Bell wanted to work in more serious realms that she changed the name of the column some years ago from "Only When I Laugh" to "In Our Prime." Still, the laughter softens the bite, says network editor Lynn Tempest. "The wonderful thing is [Bell] disarms with humor and then pierces you with the message."

And although her light touch cushions the impact of her sharp wit and firm opinions, she often receives criticism like this from a colleague's wife: "You're so outspoken," the wife said. Bell pauses, recalling, "And it was a negative thing." Bell is outspoken "by nature, by training, by occupation." And, she might add, by heritage. The influence of her Welsh forebears runs deep, she says: "Two Welshmen, three arguments." In addition, she says, since she wasn't raised in the LDS Church—she converted while a student at the University of Arizona in Tucson—she never perfected the cultural "decent girls don't laugh aloud" niceties. "I probably come on like steamrollers to some of them," she says.

It is with some pride that Bell notes she gave the first feminist-oriented speech at BYU. Back then, she defined a feminist as "someone who believed there were traditional inequities in the treatment of women, and who was interested in rectifying one or more of them." The definition, she says, is still on the mark. Shepherd, who met Bell when both taught at BYU in the late '60s, said Bell's involvement in the women's movement dates back just as far. "She was certainly never afraid and certainly never did not say something" that needed to be said, Shepherd recalls.

But, a feminist at BYU? Bell closes her eyes to think for a moment. "There's something enlivening about having to defend your position to yourself and others. Many Mormons know this from living 'out in the mission field,' as they call it. You have to be alert to who you are. "People will say to me, 'Why do you stay in Utah?' There are lots of reasons. But sometimes I say, 'Would you want every feminist to leave the state? Would you be happy if every liberal left BYU? Would that serve the cause well?"

Like many of her convictions, this resulted in a column, one called "Love It and Leaven It." The title is a play on the oft-heard "love it or leave it." "You love it and want to make it better," she says of the Beehive State. "You want to make it rich with diversity. You want to salt and pepper it."

Bell's wit seeks no targets, except perhaps the humanness in all of us. Never, for example, does she use sarcastic humor on a student. "Sometimes people say to me, 'Boy, I bet your students stay in line. Otherwise, you'd zing 'em.' . . . My father used to say, 'Never fight with an unarmed man,' and students are in a vulnerable position. My job is to create an environment where they can explore and ask questions, not a climate where they're afraid they're going to be zapped."

Nor will she make blanket belittlements about women who don't share her feminist leanings. "I'm not going to engage in women bashing," she says. "We are where we are. I remember when Maya Angelou came to BYU 15, 20 years ago and someone asked, 'What about the Mormons and their policy on the blacks?' And she said, 'When people know better, they'll do better.'"

Despite any philosophical differences, Bell has "a sense of the network" formed by all women. She's found traditional Mormon women, for instance, to be diverse and sophisticated. "They are not as outspoken as some people. But when I've had the chance to talk to them about what they really think and feel, there's amazing depth." Her own image, she admits, is itself buffeted by fickle perceptions. "Inside the state I'm considered a radical feminist and liberal and all that. But out of state, there's immediately this perception of a square Mormon woman, who couldn't possibly be in the 20th century at all, let alone getting ready for the 21st." Bell's connection with the network has also fed a passion for unpublished diaries of women, common and uncommon. "If you look at 'women's history' and you look at Eleanor Roosevelt and Golda Meir, it's as if you were to look at Utah and go to King Peak and Mount Timpanogos and say, 'OK, I know Utah,' instead of looking in the valleys where the life is lived."

She recently combined her fondness for unpublished journals with a passion for performing—she took on the road a one-woman play she authored about Mormon pioneer midwife Patty Sessions. "I had someone tell me once, 'Oh, you should have been an actress.' And I said, 'I am; I have a captive audience five days a week,'" says Bell. "There's a lot of ham in most teachers." This day, that's what she's doing: giving a few lessons in life. In one class, sophomore writing students are reading their own essays, in which they've re-examined their beliefs after reading some of history's great philosophers. "When these kids read Freud or Darwin, it can be a shattering king of thing," Bell explained quietly. Either they've got to accept Darwin, which means overturning a belief they've held for a couple of decades, or they've got to deny Darwin, which means they're going in the face of scientific evidence."

One young writer notes with some surprise: "The more I learn, the more ideas I encounter, the more options I have." With that, Bell says she's satisfied. "I don't want to make rebels out of these kids. But I do hope they'll become thinkers." And, remember Mary, the short story heroine who exiled herself in silence? During class, a young man thoughtfully raises his hand. Television, he suggests tells us what thoughts we can safely think.

Bell nods in agreement. "We want a script to live by, and if TV gives us one, we're willing to learn at least a few lines." If Bell has anything to say about it, more students—and women—will learn to write their own scripts.

This People Magazine
Most of these are short, humorous pieces, written originally for network, the Utah working women's magazine. But a fine, extended, serious essay, "When Nice Ain't So Nice," argues that the greatest problem with Niceness, which seems to be a natural vice of our culture, is not that it's wimpy, but that it's dangerous: Under its perennial, childish smile it often hides "manipulation, passive-aggression, duplicity, and denial." It encourages hidden abuse of women and children, Utah's huge consumption of tranquilizers and anti-depressants, and ignorance of what is really going on.

Bell's voice is funny, loving, nostalgic, above all sane. She is the closest thing we have to a Mormon Garrison Keillor (whom she recommends as the best of her "Sickbed Sidekicks"). She carries her Mormon and feminist convictions lightly but with incisive power and great range—from the classic pinprick to our culture's obsessive gardening and giving ("Zzzuchini!") to a wonderful parable about mid-life wish-fulfillment ("A Fable for the Prime").

Utah Holiday Magazine
"Comedy is a man in trouble," says Elouise Bell, remembering a quote from Jerry Lewis. However, BYU professor and network columnist, Bell didn't start using humor because she was in any sort of trouble, but as a way to reach people. "I tried to use humor to connect with people," Bell says, "and it worked."

Bell is probably best known for her witty writing in the network column, "In Our Prime," (previously titled "Only When I Laugh,") a column she's composed for the past 12 years. In her column, Bell entertains readers with her wry humor and instructs with seeds of wisdom. Bell writes about a number of topics from the many uses for zucchini (lamination being one) to self discovery, always relaying her unique view of the world to readers. And this fall, Bell's first collection of columns is due out: Only When I Laugh, published by Signature Books.

As an English professor at Brigham Young University, Bell doesn't lecture to her students, but uses humor to excite them. Bell's classroom is a stage, her students, a captive audience, and Bell is the performer. "I have a lot of ham in me," Bell admits. Once when asked why didn't go into acting, Bell responded, "But I did! Who do you know who has an audience five days a week, 30 years in a row?"

Acting or writing humor doesn't always come easily for Bell. "Humor is difficult," she admits, "because it has a lot to do with an individual's perception." Bell compares writing humor to cooking a fine souffle: "A good souffle is filled with air and it rises. It's light and airy and fluffy," she explains. "If it doesn't rise, it falls, and it's flat and it's heavy. Good humor, good wit, has to be like that, it has to be light and sparkling and buoyant."

Bell doesn't consider herself a comical person, but someone with an insatiable curiosity who is interested in ideas and words. "I like to find out about things," she says. "I'm interested in so many things, many little things." Bell's favorite humorous writers are Betty MacDonald, author of The Egg and I, and Jane Austen. "As far as witty humor, there is nobody better than Jane Austen," Bell says. "Every page [in her books] has its hidden gems and subtle ironies."

Bell's intriguing interests were evident last August when she had just returned from her Idaho cabin, where she had been mountain biking and "rusticating," ("You have to walk to the bathroom,") and was on her way to upstate New York to learn to sing Scottish ballads at the Omega Institute.

Bell is originally from the East Coast, but now makes her home in Orem, where she lives with her two dogs, Mandy, a golden retriever, and Mickey, a Scottish terrier. In her living room corner stands a music stand which prompts the question of whether she plays a musical instrument. She responds to the question by pulling out a conductor's baton, a present from a friend, and begins swaying the baton back and forth as if conducting an orchestra. Bell notes that she is teaching herself to play the blues harmonica and admits if she wasn't a writer or a teacher, she would like to be a conductor or sing soprano.

Bell has a number of goals to strive for but won't reveal what they are. "It's better to do things and talk about them after," she says.

Utah Humanities Council News
Signature Books should be commended for making available to the world Elouise Bell's hard-headed, soft-hearted, and indisputably hilarious collection of humorous essays.

Western American Literature, Shelley Armitage
Elouise Bell, familiar to readers of network magazine, explores in this collection of essays an area that has endeared her to readers past: the human dilemma. With the tip-off in her title, she has the unique ability to examine often painful knowledge with the wit and wisdom of a survivor.

One imagines the joys enacted in her classrooms as well, for Elouise Bell is professor of English and associate dean of general and honors education at Brigham Young University. This text extends that classroom to the general reader and ranks Elouise Bell with the best of American humor essayists. Like E. B. White, Elouise Bell transforms the seemingly typical or mundane and in so doing celebrates the essential transformation of self which is a daily, but often unappreciated, phenomenon. We enjoy a host of re-invention of the average, from patriotism to "Matriotism" ("The matriot is one who loves and loyally or zealously supports her motherland"); zucchini to "zzzzucchini" (in its unfailing productivity, zucchini may even be laminated into playing cards, napkin rings, earrings . . .); the concept of the mutt to "peerless pets" (she offers reasons for our love affair sometimes to the exclusion of children); or Christmas to "Chrismyths" (the deconstruction of the "myth of Christmas past," for example). In all, she addresses in a fashion akin to but not as windy as Erma Bombeck psychological trends ("power-napping"), the meaning of holidays, the culture of the family, the consistency of time passing (I grow old, I grow old), and other common experiences which she uniquely views. My own personal favorite is "Woman Warblers." Her explanation of why women whistle sheds new light on the musical medleys of my sixth-grade teacher.

The point is, if it hurts, "it" (the many experiences and perceptions Elouise Bell analyzes) deepens our own insight, understanding, and appreciation. As anyone who has hit his or her funny bone knows, comedy is connected to tragedy. No wonder Elouise Bell has been named for "excellence in journalism" by the Society of Professional Journalists. She not only warmly reminds us that "pains" may be funny, but she writes so well that we feel we've had a comic, yet engaging, conversation with the author.

Irreantum, Patricia T. Coleman
[Editor's note: This review was originally presented at the Association for Mormon Letters annual meeting on January 26, 1991.]

The publication of Elouise Bell's Only When I Laugh is happy news indeed for those of us who have, over the years, enjoyed her columns in Network. It is especially happy news at this time of the year when we have just been through the holidays and, in typical Salt Lake City fashion, are in the midst of what may turn out to be a rather extended temperature inversion. Suffering as we all are right now from what Elouise Bell calls "afterburn"—that complex of mopping-up chores that accompany so many otherwise pleasant activities, like Christmas—I discovered that January in Utah is just the time to make this book my constant companion. For Elouise Bell not only knows when to laugh, she knows what is funny—at least to people like me. She seems to understand better than most people that humor—really important humor, that is—is profoundly serious.

By that, I don't want to suggest that her humor is black, depressing, or sardonic. On the contrary, she understands that humor is best when it is a kind of gentle, self-correcting wisdom born of penetrating, self and social analysis. Her language moves from the precise to the broadly suggestive, exploring, as all good humorists do, the nuances of hyperbole. I do not think that it is saying too much about the essays in Only When I Laugh that they are therapeutic: indeed, her lively, self-deprecating style reminds us when we are not taking ourselves seriously enough as well as when we are taking ourselves far too seriously.

On every page and in every essay in the collection, I found myself; it was as if Elouise had written this just for me. I suppose that, like Elouise, I too am a Mug-wump, a "person [according to the essay by the same name] who sits with 'mug' on one side of the fence and 'wump' on the other" (4), an interesting discovery for a woman who, only in Utah, can be safely called a feminist. This discovery follows upon a very recent visit to London where, having declared that I was indeed a feminist, I found myself under verbal assault by three or four otherwise quite civil English gentlemen who, having just read Germaine Greer's observation in the London Times that no real feminist ought "to consider it a good day until she had insulted six men," quite naturally assumed that my brand of feminism—I call it "Utah feminism"—was identical with, God save us, English academic feminism, Oxford-style.

The shock of that experience sent me back for comfort to Elouise's "Mug-wump" essay. Here she reminded me that we are all of us fence sitters of one kind or another, that being a fence sitter is more than just political expedient (especially in foreign countries); it is also philosophically necessary because we are always, if we are thinking people, amending our positions on the basis of new insights. She also reminded me that we are all seeking the same thingslike freedom from pigeon-holing, freedom even from misdirected verbal assaults; we just do it under different names and guises.

In another essay, Elouise reminds us:

The problem with Nice isn't that it's sometimes wimpy; the problem is that Nice can be dangerous. More crimes have been committed behind the mask of niceness, than behind all the ski masks worn to all the convenience store stick-ups ever perpetrated (40).

I remember what "nice" meant when I was in college. It was how we described the girl for whom we were trying to arrange a blind date. The guy would ask, "Is she pretty?" To which we would respond, "She's great, a really nice girl. You'll like her." Of course, if she had been pretty, we all knew that we would have said, "She's great, really pretty. You'll love her." At Holy Names College, "nice" was the blind date kiss of death, and the men from St. Mary's College knew that. Elouise reminds us:

Nice flies under false colors, wanes the replication of the gentle dove without the wisdom of the wise serpent. It is the Great Imposter, having none of the power of Virtue but seeking the influence thereof. Nice is neither kind, nor compassionate, neither good nor full of good cheer, neither hot nor cold. But, being puffed up in its own vanity, it is considerably more dangerous than luke-warmth (46).

I suppose what we Holy Names women ought to have said to the St. Mary's men when they asked us if so-and-so were pretty was, "You'd better be awfully handsome because you are really very shallow." What Elouise knows is that niceness is more than just blind-date politeness. It "edits the truth, dilutes loyalty, makes a caricature of patriotism. It hobbles Justice, short-circuits Honor, and counterfeits Mercy, Compassion, and Love" (41).

She also seems to know, better than most of us, what other words do. All this time I thought our household was the only place in the world where zucchini is a swearword in July and August. I have heard my children say, "Do we have to have the Z-word for dinner again tonight?" And I have felt as vaguely [truculent] toward neighbors who drop off sacks of unrequested zucchini on my doorstep as I do toward students who want to know if we are doing anything important in class today. In fact, I consider unrequested zucchini a kind of Mormon terrorist activity, subtle maybe, but profoundly effective.

Actually, Only When I Laugh is a collection of observations about words—all kinds of words—and what these words do and do not mean, what they do and do not do. And in each case, we get a whole new perspective on our language. For example, I'm with Elouise on the word patriotism. If we can have "patriotism," why not "matriotism"? If patriotism is about the world, Elouise tells us, matriotism is about the earth (17-19). Remember her? She's the thing that we have to save first because the world won't be worth saving if the earth is dead.

And I'm with her on a few other things, too. When was the last time you really read the name of an apartment building, a lipstick, or a car? You can be sure that the building called Hillside Pines Terrace Gardens (and in which I lived when I first came to Utah) is none of the above. In fact, it is quite comfortably situated on nearly level ground near the corner of P Street and Third Avenue. I guess Mr. Tracy didn't think "Nearly Third Avenue" or "Still on P" were good enough names for his apartment complex. I know that the lipstick I use—Midnight Mocha Madness—is much more like Hardy's description of life than it is like any kind of madness: neither life nor my lipstick are going to deliver what they incipiently promise, else I might expect tonight an evening of passion in Paris rather than what is to be my fate—a set of freshman themes. And cars—there's something else, Elouise, to look at. Did any of you ever drive a Reliant? Was it?

Like Elouise, I, too, am tired of newspeak, whether it comes out of the mouths of my daughters or my vice president. In "Liberating the Language" (81-83), Elouise points out that in a world where Danish pastry becomes just plain Danish, chaos is not far behind. What, for example, are we to do with the term rubberstamp! Does "He's just a rubberstamp" become—oh, well, never mind.

Not too many years ago, as I was driving a carload of junior high school girls home after school, I heard one say, "Well, Emily, good-bye; it's been real." I inquired of my daughter, "Real what?" You can guess her response. Nevertheless, I was undaunted. I wanted to be part of the group. She was, after all, my first child, and one wants to do the ridiculous when one doesn't understand the consequences. So the next time we dropped Heather off, I turned to Heather and said, "Good-bye Heather; it's been." I figured that if less was more, even less was the most. Wrong. Of course, the trouble with trying to be like other people, especially those younger than you, is that you never know where to stop. Apparently I had left too much out. That's pretty much how I feel when I order a Danish and get a pastry. What I really want when I order a Danish is not a Danish pastry but a Danish man.

Elouise Bell reminds us throughout her collection about the power of the word--abused power and underused power. As she herself points out in the same essay, "Mark Twain said that the difference between the right word and the almost right word was the difference between lightning and the lightning bug" (82). Or, in my case, the difference between the pastry and the person. It is in that light that you must read "Greeting Cards," especially if you feel about them as I do. I figure that there must be an inverse relationship in the real world between fresh, crisp language and income. And as a Catholic, I'm convinced that a just God has a special kind of purgatory for the perpetrators of all that awful, passionless, purple prose passing for poetry. Do you know how much people get paid to write the insides of those cards? A lot. Do you know how much anyone in this audience ever made off his or her words? Not much, I expect. Anyway, tired of reading those "warm fuzzies" (as my children call them) that you find on the typical store-bought greeting card? Tired of a world in which you not only don't have to write what you want to say, you don't even have to think it? Great, get in line behind Elouise and me. But as Elouise tells us, we don't have to settle for imitating California, where people are now hiring themselves out to hold the hands of the dying elderly who find themselves abandoned in rest homes. As Elouise says, you should "care enough to send your very self" (86).

She scoffs at trends—those tony trends—like being color analyzed ("Call Me Indian Summer," 97-99). You remember color analyzing; it's what the rich people do who aren't smart enough to know what colors look good on them and who have too much time on their hands to find out just what colors do, in fact, look good on them. Those of us in academe will love this essay. We don't make that kind of money, and we don't have that kind of time. And we'll love anyone who points out to us the ludicrous behavior of that affluent leisure class which we scorn chiefly because we do not belong. But why not? In a world where people pay perfectly good money to find out that they are a "Spring" and not an "Autumn," Elouise suggests that we ought to have more options than just the four seasons. Elouise says she thinks of herself most of the time as a "Monday Morning" (98). Personally, I'm a "3:05 Weekdays." That's the time I own between the junior high carpool and the elementary school carpool and which I reserve for writing in my cheap Osco Drugstore imitation Franklin Dayplanner the things which I should have done but didn't before 3:00 and ought to do, but probably won't, after 3:00.

But underneath all this, as underneath all her insights, are important and profound truth. We live in a world of power ties and padded shoulders. I think I agree with my father: the world was a far more interesting place when things other than shoulders were padded. Elouise wants us to know that we live in a world which dresses for success and which worries about it. We live in a world where women are actually beginning to believe that men won't take them seriously in the corporate marketplace if they are wearing open-toed shoes. Someone ought to tell those women that men won't, for the most part, take them seriously in the corporate marketplace even if they are wearing combat boots. Someone ought to tell them that being a liberated woman is more than the right to wear padded shoulders and become the CEO of some semi-ethical business. And someone ought to tell the men who are wearing all those power ties to take them off; a lot of us think men are already too scary.

In fact, the world we live in is already too scary, and it takes someone like Elouise to make that clear. She reminds us that we don't listen to what other people say. We don't listen to what is said to us. We don't even listen to what we say. We have only to look at Elouise's essay "The Meeting" to appreciate her penetrating wit. She turns accepted Mormon clichés—indeed, any clichés of custom and thought—upside-down and inside-out. And her language in doing this is eloquent. In her marvelous parody of the church meeting, she reports that Sister Amanda Ridgely Knight will discuss "The Role of Man: Where Does He Fit in the Eternal Plan?" and Sister Alice Young Taylor will lecture on "Three Important Men from Church History" (13). Now, I've never been to a Mormon meeting, but I have been to my share of Catholic ones, and I am here to tell you that we Catholics haven't yet come up with three important women in church history. In short, this parody, while clearly a Mormon parody, is a lesson to all of us who are products of and participants in patriarchal religions. I especially liked the discussion of "What We Look for in Boys We Date" (13). I know in my high school in a course called "What Boys Look for in Girls They Date," we were told that every man wants to marry a virgin. What I wanted to know was why, then, all the boys I knew were so busy every weekend de-virginizing the population.

Elouise's kind of humor doesn't settle for easy one-liners or take cheap shots. She understands the power of language, and even when the wit is sharp, it is elegant.

Patricia Truxler Coleman joined the Juan Diego Catholic High School faculty in September of 2000. She taught at Westminster College for thirty years as a professor of English. Dr. Coleman has been the recipient of more than ten Utah Humanities Council grants over the past thirty years and has lectured widely on her favorite subjects: Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, and T. S. Eliot, and regional American women writers. In 1995 she established the Jane Austen Society of Utah, a chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North Ameria, and has served as president and director of the Utah chapter for the past six years. Dr. Coleman is married and the mother of three daughters and three stepsons.