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...

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. A. J. Liebling's name is so firmly identified with the New Yorker's Wayward...

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...

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...

Mr. Robert Benchley tells of the trouble he had when, like Ward, he became worried about grammar and the sound of words. It all started when he tried to figure out the present tense of the verb of which "wrought" is the past participle:

It is our duty to confess that Mr. Benchley is changing. No longer can the book seller honestly tell you that this is just good, clean, wholesome humor. It isn't so. His carefree spirit has been darkened by the presence of satire. Acid has risen in him and given expression to bitterness just when he seemed about to be nice and funny. The tendency to fancy has increased. He is always slipping away from this orderly and practical world into a world of incongruous fantasy. Really, it is rather irrevere...

Mr. Benchley's collected burlesques are, of course, exceedingly funny: they are a little like Stephen Leacock, but more urbane than Leacock. Mr. Benchley, if he has not the force of Mr. Leacock's violent and barbarous imagination, has not developed Mr. Leacock's vice of making five bad gags to one good one. He nearly always makes you laugh and he never makes you ill—which is high praise for an American humorist.

The heavier critics have under-rated Benchley because of his "short flight," missing his distinguished contribution to the fine art of comic brevity. He would thank me not to call him an artist, but I think he was an artist who wouldn't give up to it, like a busy housewife fighting the onset of a migraine headache.