SOURCE: An introduction to Selected Short Stories of William Dean Howells, edited by Ruth Bardon, Ohio University Press, 1997, pp. xiii-xxvii.
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, cussedness, machinery—social and industrial—and many other impersonal tyrannies." Benchley's favorite piece of humor was "My Financial Career," in Literary Lapses, where a bedeviled Little Man of the lower middle class is overawed and confused by a bank and its officials. Robert once stated, "I have enjoyed Leacock's work so much that I have written everything he ever wrote—anywhere from one to five years after him." Leacock wrote of the Little Man in an urbane prose that owed much to the familiar essays of Addison and Lamb, to the English tradition of parody as found in Punch (one of whose columnists, A. A. Milne, was another favorite of Benchley), to nonsense humor as exemplified in the verse of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, and to the newspaper columnists on Leacock's own side of the Atlantic. In its liveliness, it resembled most perhaps the last-named kind of writing. Despite Benchley's statements of his indebtedness, he might conceivably have written much as he did had he never read Leacock, but his work included all of the elements that went into Leacock's humor. The nonsense element, expressed by such bits as the line from Leacock's Nonsense Novels, "Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions," was to recur with special effectiveness in Benchley's writing.…
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