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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 yet genial prose the absurdities and frustrations of contemporary urban and suburban middle-class life, its dilemmas, crazily named denizens, gadgets, and games. Second, Robert Benchley was a brilliant parodist who mocked the excesses of writers from Shakespeare to Galsworthy, as well as his own pretensions of erudition. Third, he created--as did Artemus Ward and Will Rogers--a comic persona, variously called the little man, the bumbler, the fool (the eiron of Greek comedy); a neurotic, put-upon, sweet person--as Russell Maloney noted, "a man of good will who was always slightly embarrassed or incommoded by the day-to-day happenings of life." Fourth, like early practitioners of the tall tale or the hoax, Benchley luxuriated in the absurd; his little essays flashed beyond logic to what Edmund Wilson called "the disintegrating language of Dada," even though Benchley's narrative voice seemed to seek to impose order.
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