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 maintain several careers and had decided to narrow his activities: "Put me down as an actor.… From now on I am going to cut out everything but screen work, and limit that to acting." Between 1940 and his death in 1945, he played supporting roles in thirty feature-length pictures, starred in fifteen more short subjects, and continued his frequent guest appearances on radio broadcasts, though his own radio series ended in 1940.
Robert Benchley wrote humor, satire, reportage and criticism; but all of his writing that found its way into books may be broadly categorized as personal essays. These essays assumed various shapes, of course, including some narration and a substantial amount of dialog; they were always Benchley on, or off, some subject. And he was always more important than his subject. His writing career extended roughly from 1915 to 1945, during which time many hundreds of such pieces, originally published in magazines, were reprinted in periodic collections. An additional source of Benchley's fame arose from his work in Hollywood, where he made forty-eight shorts and appeared in, or collaborated on, forty-seven feature pictures. Many of these contributed to making his name synonymous with comedy of a quietly distinctive sort.
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