Six feet tall in size 12 flats, she could seem larger than life, with a tornado of strawberry blond hair swirling about her head and a mind and a tongue sharper than that proverbial serpent’s tooth. For nearly four decades, Ms. Ivins relentlessly and often mercilessly held state and national politicians to account, famously tagging George W. Bush with the nickname “Shrub” and infamously suggesting that a speech given by the conservative pundit and presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican convention “was probably better in the original German.”

By the time she died of cancer, Ms. Ivins had become so well-known — as an outspoken best-selling writer, syndicated columnist and professional wit — that she was one of those first-name-only people, like Cher and Madonna. At least she was in Texas, where she grew up and where she always found her best material. She had the loudest voice for progressive politics the state had ever heard, and if you shared her views, you were a little less lonely whenever her opinions showed up in print, especially during the 1970s, when she worked at The Texas Observer. Corruption, bigotry and mind-boggling stupidity were rampant back then — as now, alas — but Ms. Ivins and her co-editor, Kaye Northcott, often seemed to be the only reporters willing to call out the criminals, bigots and idiots for what they were.

Often, their targets didn’t quite get it. As Ms. Ivins recalled of those days, after she reported in The Observer that some “egg-suck’” pol “ran on all fours and had the mind of an adolescent pissant,” he’d “beam, spread his arms and holler, ‘Baby! Yew put mah name in yore paper!’”

But maybe they did get it. I used to think that her Professional Texan act was just that, but I see now that it was also a way to show that we Texans were all in it together, and that the things that united us — our expressiveness and expansiveness, our culture and our nearly inexplicable love of a nearly uninhabitable place — were more important than our divisions.

More important, before Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert — and their teams of writers — Ms. Ivins was a one-woman humor mill, churning out finely honed one-liners that would today send President Trump into an envy meltdown. Unlike so many partisans on the left — and like our current president, truth be told — she understood that “the best way to get the sons of bitches is to make people laugh at them.” She was nonpartisan in her attacks: Camille Paglia was a “crassly egocentric raving twit.” Bill Clinton was “weaker than bus station chili.” Ross Perot was “all hawk and no spit,” while Ronald Reagan “proved that ignorance is no handicap to the presidency.” She famously said of a Republican congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.” That she bullied the bullies made her a local hero at first, and then a national one.