Robert (Charles) Benchley Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Robert (Charles) Benchley

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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