Comedy writer and blogger Mike Gerber honored humorist Robert Benchley on his 113th birthday (Benchley is, sadly, not alive to enjoy it):
- Happy Birthday Robert Benchley!
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.
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