A Not So Tiny Wit

Robert Benchley was an American original. An original what, I have no idea. Some say humorist. But he was more than that. He was also a first-rate pedagogue. Consider his Academy Award-winning short film How to Sleep . Thought you could sleep before? You fool . . .

I started picking through my worn copy of Benchley Lost and Found after coming across this fun site . Benchley’s concerns are still our concerns: quack medicine, quack politics, quack religion, and the unutterable indignities that accompany public transportation.

Flipping through Lost and Found , a collection of thirty-nine essays composed in the early 1930s, these gems fell out:

“[W]e read one day in the newspapers that Germany has gone over from the control of the Workers National Peoples Socialist Centrist Party (with 256 seats) to the Bavarian Nationalist Optimist Fascist Unreinigung Party (with 396 seats) . . . the next day you read that the election which hurled the Workers Nationalist Optimist Centrist, etc., people into office was a preliminary election or Wahl , and that the finals have shown that the balance of power resides in the hands of the Christian Hanoverian Revalorization Gesellschaft Party (with fifteen seats and a bicycle), which means that Europe is on the verge of conflagration, beginning with a definite rupture with the Slovenes (the Extreme Left Slovenes, that is, not to be confused with the Conservative Radical Slovenes).”

“The sad suicide of Dr. Eno M. Kerk in 1930 was laid to the fact that he had just got a vitamin isolated from the E class and almost in the F, when the room suddenly got warm and it turned into a full-fledged vitamin G. The doctor was heartbroken and deliberately died of malnutrition by refusing to eat any of the other vitamins from that day on. If he couldn’t have vitamin F, he wouldn’t have any.”

“The U.S. Post Office is one of the most popular line-standing fields in the country. It has been estimated that six-tenths of the population of the United States spend their entire lives standing in line in a post office. When you realize that no provision is made for their eating or sleeping or intellectual advancement while they are thus standing in line, you will understand why six-tenths of the population look so cross and peaked. The wonder is that they have the courage to go on living at all.”

“I first began my experiments with spiritism in 1909 while sitting in the dark with a young lady who later turned out to be not my wife. Watches with phosphorescent dials had just come into use and I had one of the few in town . . . . I had just moved my watch up to my nose to take a look at it in the dark, as I realized that it was time to go beddie-bye, when the young lady, seeing a phosphorescent blob of light make its way like a comet through the dark at her side, screamed, ‘There’s a ghost in the room!’ and fainted heavily . . . . So, stepping across he prostrate body, I went out into the world to become a medium, or, in the technical language of the craft, a medium stout.”

“They were laughing at commas.” ( upon hearing George Bernard Shaw’s effect on an audience )

Benchley sat regularly at the Algonquin Round Table . Among Benchley’s tablemates: Dorothy Parker (“If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me”), George S. Kaufman (whose plays include You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner ), Alexander Woollcott (the man in The Man Who Came to Dinner ), and Harpo Marx (no comment). This inimitable collection of wags was imitated with varying degrees of success in the film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle , with Campbell Scott (George S.’s son) playing Benchley. It seems that our hero at one time trysted with Mrs. Parker, to no lasting effect.

The Harvard Lampoon , the New Yorker , and Vanity Fair all saw Benchley in their pages. (He famously left a staff position at VF as an act of loyalty to Mrs. Parker, who was terminated with extreme prejudice for being an uncongenial employee, which is exactly what you would have expected from an underpaid socialist.)

Benchley had something of a career in films, including a supporting role in Hitchcock’s vaporgenie vaporizer Foreign Correspondent , as well as his own award-winning shorts, which instructed audiences in how to train a dog and oneself . A generous consumer of alcohol, he suffered from cirrhosis of the liver and died in 1945, at age 56.

Yes, Benchley was—like Parker and Kaufman and Woollcott and Mark Twain and S.J. Perelman and James Thurber , and, for that matter, John Harvey Kellogg —an American original.

I still have no idea what that means . . .