Today would’ve been humorist
Robert Benchley’s 113th birthday. He’s one of my all-time favorites. Anyway, while we’re raising a glass of soda pop to Bob—he died of cirrhosis of the liver--you can read my short bio/appreciation below...
With his breezy, conversational style mixing high culture and low, Robert Benchley (1889-1945) is the first modern humorist. We’re still using trails he blazed: while an undergraduate at Harvard, he “invented” the magazine parody. Although he has never quite reached the
New Yorker-fueled respectability that James Thurber or fellow Algonquin Round Tabler Dorothy Parker achieved—you’ll never find Benchley in a high school textbook, for example—his contemporaries considered him incomparable. And as far as
The New Yorker is concerned, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that, were there no Benchley to add star-power to its staff, that magazine might not have made it through its lean beginnings. Beginning in the late Twenties, more and more of his time was spent in Hollywood, writing, then acting in, movies. Though he dismissed his movie work as puerile, he won an Oscar in 1935.
Mirabile dictu, his stuff is still funny today. I spent many a happy night as a kid reading pieces, laughing and taking mental notes on what I could steal later. I’m not the only one, either—every newspaper humorist has a dash (or a dollop) of Benchley in their prose. Dave Barry, for example, strikes me as Benchley under the influence of cheap beer instead of bootleg gin.
Benchley’s humor came from an easy, seemingly effortless voice, coming closer to the naturalness of conversation than any humorist had before. It seemed to flow from who he was, and mimicked the style of a particularly witty and avuncular friend. Benchley is the humorist you want to have a drink with (and he’d take you up on it—more about that later). Perhaps that’s why his material has aged better than any of his contemporaries; S.J. Perelman is so crammed with then-topical references he’s almost unreadable today; and though Thurber’s legacy has been exquisitely maintained, great swaths of his work—his “little man” character fighting the War Against Women, for example—is so dated one wonders what planet many of his stories occurred on. But Benchley endures. Here’s an excerpt from a frequently-anthologized piece—I selected it mainly for its brevity, but it should give you some idea of the writer’s style.
“MORE SONGS FOR MELLER
by Robert Benchley
As Senorita Raquel Meller sings entirely in Spanish, it is again explained, the management prints little synopses of the songs in the program, telling what each is all about and why she is behaving the way she is. They make delightful reading during those periods when Senorita Meller is changing mantillas, and, in case she should run out of songs before she runs out of mantillas, we offer a few new synopses for her repertoire.
1) Voy Bien? [Am I Going in the Right Direction?]
When the acorns begin dropping in Spain there is an old legend that for every acorn which drops there is a baby born in Valencia. This is so silly that no one pays any attention to it now, not even the gamekeeper’s daughter, who would pay attention to anything. She goes from house to house, ringing doorbells and then running away. She hopes that some day she will ring the right doorbell and will trip and fall, so that Prince Charming will catch her. So far, no one has even come to the door. Poor Pepita! if that is her name.
2) Caminetas de Flanela [Flannel Vests]
Princess Rosamonda goes nightly to the Puerta del Sol to see if the early morning edition of the papers is out yet. If it isn’t she hangs around humming to herself. If it is, she hangs around humming just the same. One night she encounters a young matador who is returning from dancing school. The finches are singing and there is Love in the air. Princess Rosamonda ends up in the police station.
3) La Guia [The Time Table]
It is day of the bull fight in Madrid. Everyone is cockeyed. The bull has slipped out by the back entrance to the arena and has gone home, disgusted. Nobody notices that the bull has gone except Nina, a peasant girl who has come to town that day to sell her father. She looks with horror at the place in the Royal Box where the bull ought to be sitting, and sees there instead her algebra teacher, whom she had told that she was staying at home on account of a sick headache. You can imagine her feelings!...
...6) Abra Ud. Esa Ventana [Open That Window]
The lament of a mother whose oldest son is too young to vote. She walks the streets singing, 'My son can not vote! My son is not old enough!' There seems to be nothing that can be done about it.”
If some of that reminds you of Woody Allen, well, you win a prize.
Benchley’s voice was so “natural” that accounts of him inevitably portray him as the character named Benchley he created for the page: an off-handedly funny raconteur with an endless stream of absurd bon mots. (“Let’s get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini,” is one of his.) And this certainly was one aspect of his public persona. He was also a devoted friend; in the movie
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, he is portrayed as Parker’s long-suffering boon companion, bucking her up jovially between botched suicide attempts. But the real Benchley was much more complex—much darker, and much more interesting—than this well-dressed one-liner machine.
During one raucous night in the Twenties, someone told Benchley that the bootleg gin he was drinking was “slow poison.”
“So who’s in a hurry?” Benchley replied. First, there was the drinking. Benchley was a teetotaler until age 31. Then, almost immediately he became a committed drinker. Actually I think the word I’m looking for is “lethally heavy”—it takes concerted effort to drink yourself to death, as Benchley did, when you start so late.
The writer’s home life was similarly divided—until the early 20s, Benchley appeared to be a model suburban family man. But from 1923 until his death, Benchley balanced a wife and children in Westchester with an entirely separate life. He spent the week (and sometimes weekends, too) in a hotel room in New York working, courting a series of mistresses, and carousing. The busy Benchley was also a frequent customer of Polly Adler, Manhattan’s famous madam of the 20s and 30s; Tallulah Bankhead marveled over his technique as a lover. And yet Benchley never considered divorce; he once said to James Thurber that “a man had his wife, whatever their relationship might be, and that was that. The rest was his own business.” And by all accounts, his wife felt the same way.
Benchley was a maelstrom of conflicting impulses. As his friend Robert Sherwood said, “His life represented some of the strangest reversals of moods and habits I have ever observed in one human being. Together with many others, I saw him in various constrasting characters: as a methodical, teetotalling, nonsmoking, galosh-wearing, penurious, homebound commuter…as a violent crusader for civil rights…a passionate pacifist, and (so help me!) a prohibitionist; and, finally, as a laboriously irresponsible flaneur or court jester of the Café Society belt, of Hollywood or Antibes.” Clearly there were forces at war within him; but the genius with which his writing concealed that, makes it doubly fascinating to me.
“Remember how good I was at Latin in school? Well, look where it got me.”—R.B. to his wife, in the midst of a particularly undignified stunt during a short film.There are as many ways to live a life as there are people, and if Benchley was a happy man with a happy family, who cares about the details? But he was not happy; his dual life kept him from being the husband and father he doubtless wanted to be; financially he was always just one nostril above water. And whatever his other problems might’ve been, he suffered from what I call “Humorist’s Disease,” a sense that professionally funny writers have that what they do is somewhat disreputable and utterly meaningless. He always talked about suspending humor in favor of writing an extensive history of the Queen Anne period—but when he stopped writing in 1943, nothing followed but more roles in movies he found vapid. Once, in the 40s, he ran into Sherwood at a Hollywood party, and exclaimed, “I can’t stand those eyes looking at me! He’s looking at me and thinking of how he knew me when I was going to be a great writer—and he’s thinking, now look at what I am!”
But while his struggles add an interesting texture to his work, it doesn’t need the drama of his life as a backdrop—unlike Dorothy Parker, whose traumas have been broadened, universalized and retold in a sort of Sylvia Plath-like way. Ultimately, Benchley’s work stands on its own. He gave so many people so much pleasure that it’s heartbreaking to see how little he could generate for himself.
“When a great humorist dies, everybody should go to a place where there is laughter, and drink to his memory until the lights go out.”—R.B.Though he was a bit too old for Hemingway’s “Lost Generation,” he was as much a casualty of the Twenties as F. Scott Fitzgerald. Benchley was a Victorian New Englander knocked off balance by the new freedoms of the post-World War One world. And like Fitzgerald, Benchley didn’t have—or couldn’t bring himself to use—modern tools like psychotherapy, effective drugs, or 12-step programs, to help himself battle his demons. For all his talent—and all the joy that he brought to people, something that should never be forgotten—Benchley probably died as conflicted about who he was, and what he wanted, as ever. Near his death, he complained to
New YorkerHarold Ross that “I’m not a writer, and I’m not an actor. I don’t know what I am.”
Well, the rest of the English-speaking world knew: he was a unique treasure, and the tragedy of Benchley's life was that, like so many of us, he couldn’t see it. Luckily, he left plenty of evidence. Here’s a final bit, from a piece he wrote after chancing across an American Psychatric Association list of the symptoms of schizophrenia:
“1. ‘Defective judgment.’ Well, I could keep you here all night giving examples of my defective judgment that would make your blood curdle. I couldn’t even judge a sack-race. On this count I qualify hands down.
2. “Retarded Perception.” I didn’t even know that the fleet was in until I read Time ten days later.
3. “Restriction in the field of attention.” My attention can be held only by strapping me down to a cot and sitting on my chest. Even then my eyes wander.
4. “silly laughter.” I hold the Interscholastic (New England), Intercollegiate, East Coast Amatteur and Open Professional cups for silly laughter. I laugh at anything except a French clown. You can’t be sillier than that.
5. “Lack of skill in motor performance.” I was asked to surrender my license while driving an old Model T Ford in 1915 because I could not co-ordinate in time in press the clutch at just the right moment. I also had a little trouble with “right” and “left.” Next to “silly laughter,” “lack of skill in motor performance” is my forte.
6. “Stupor.” We need not go into this. The last thing I remember clearly is that elaborate parade for Admiral Dewey under the arch at Twenty-third Street. There are hundreds of people willing to bet that I have never had my eyes open. I have no proof to the contrary.”
For an introduction to Robert Benchley’s writings, try
The Benchley Roundup, a collection of the best of his work, edited by his son Nathaniel. For a biography of Robert Benchley, try
Laughter's Gentle Soul, by Billy Altman. Also interesting—though out-of-print and thus hard to find—is Robert Benchley, by Nathaniel Benchley.
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