Lucille Ball, Amy Sedaris, Whoopi Goldberg, Sarah Silverman: These and many other women have left an estimable mark on comedy after fighting not just the fight that all comedians have to wage in order to get before an audience, but also an entertainment industry that imposes extra barriers for women.

One comic writer who refused to be daunted was among the funniest of all: Nora Ephron. She grew up in a Hollywood household surrounded by filmmakers and actors, instructed by her mother to make the best of whatever came along. “Everything is copy,” she told Nora, and Nora took the lesson. She went east to attend Wellesley College, which, though an all-women’s school, specialized in producing marriageable young women. As she told the graduating class of a generation later, “It was so long ago that among the things that I honestly cannot conceive of life without, that had not yet been invented: pantyhose, lattes, Advil, pasta (there was no pasta then, there was only spaghetti and macaroni)…well, you get the point, it was a long time ago.”

It was so long ago that when she graduated and went to New York to become a journalist, she landed a job at Newsweek—not as a writer, not then, for if you were a woman, she related, you went to work in the mailroom, whereas a male with exactly the same qualifications would be hired as a reporter. Ephron had a lifelong habit, though, of crashing through whatever glass ceiling lay above her, and after doing time as a fact checker, she chanced her way into the pages of the New York Post. With Victor Navasky, later to become publisher of the Nation, she had taken part in a lampoon of the paper published during a newspaper strike of 1962, and though the editors wanted to sue, the publisher of the Post, a formidable woman named Dorothy Schiff, said, “Don’t be ridiculous. If they can parody the Post they can write for it. Hire them.”

Thus followed a mountain of articles and commentary, funny, satirical, and very popular. Another lifelong habit of Ephron’s was to bite the hands that fed her, and not even Schiff was safe from her witty but seldom mean-spirited pen. (“Let them read schlock,” said Ephron of Schiff’s editorial method.) Magazine articles followed on favorite targets (then the Nixon girls; if she had seen Ivanka, she doubtless would have doubled down on the attack), then books, then screenplays and films, among them Heartburn, a brittle and barely disguised study of her unhappy marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein, and When Harry Met Sally…, with its famous fake-orgasm-in-a-restaurant scene.

Stricken by leukemia, Ephron barely acknowledged her illness, working on a pile of projects until just days before going into the hospital. She died in 2012. Had she lived, she would be 80 this week. The chances are good that she’d still be making us laugh. For that we need to turn to Nora Ephron’s work in print and on film, reveling with her in how odd and flawed our kind is—and how lucky comedians are that that’s true.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.