Robert Benchley (1889-1945) was one of the most popular and influential humorists of 20th century America. He took his gentle, self-deprecating wit to celebrity in literature, the theater, and the movies. The offspring of a prominent local family and...

Robert Benchley combined in his life and work many of the traditional qualities of the American humorist. First, and most important, like Washington Irving and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Benchley was a superb comic essayist, catching in carefully cadenced...

In his relatively short life Benchley managed to enjoy careers as a humorist, theater critic, newspaper columnist, screenwriter, radio performer and movie actor. His writing appeared in such magazines as the old Life and The New Yorker and his pieces...

Robert Charles Benchley (September 15, 1889 – November 21, 1945) was an American humorist best known for his work as a newspaper columnist and film actor. From his beginnings at the Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University, through his many...

A federal judge has ruled that compiling Dorothy Parker's poems was a far less original act than writing them.The editor of a book of uncollected work by the late author did not show enough "creativity" to claim copyright infringement from a near-identical set contained in...

MERE ANARCHYBy Woody Allen Random House, 160 pages, $21.95 THE INSANITY DEFENSE: THE COMPLETE PROSE By Woody Allen Random House, 342 pages, $15.95 Like every other kind of writer, humorists go in and out of fashion. Nobody seems to read Stephen Leacock anymore,...

In Paris, "Bar Americain" means a place that serves liquor as well as wine and beer. So the first thing that catches your eye when you walk into celebrity chef Bobby Flay's new restaurant is the enormous zinc bar, smack in the center of the...

Internet-trawling fans of the Gilmore Girls received some bittersweet news yesterday afternoon. After seven seasons, the beloved mother/daughter beyond-bonding dramedy will be going off the air in just two short weeks. Even those of us who anticipated the show's demise were shocked – two weeks?...

He wasn't lazy. He liked to put things off as long as he could. He was a procrastinator. He got his copy done just in the nick of time for the New Yorker. They often had to send runners out to get it. Benchley's law is "Any man can do any amount of work, provided it's not the work he's supposed to be doing." So he would find all manner of things to do rather than start a piece. During the Depression decade, Robert Benchley wrote nearly seventy-five casual essays for...

There came a time early in the 1940s when Benchley, after years of resisting identification as an actor, had to concede that he no longer considered himself a writer. Nathaniel Benchley tells of his father's announcement, in November 1943, "that he was through with writing and was resigned to being a radio and movie comedian," but he had already issued much the same statement two years earlier in a Columbia Studios press release. According to this source, he had wearied of trying to mai...

It is impossible to say just when the bemused householder and white-collar man became really prominent in American humor, but by 1910 Stephen Leacock, Simeon Strunsky, and Clarence Day, Jr. were writing pieces in which the disguise of each author was just that. As noted before, one of Benchley's direct models was Leacock, whose Literary Lapses appeared in that year. "Leacock to quote Ralph L. Curry found much of his fun in the little man beset by advertising, fads, convention, sex, science, c...