The Benchley Roundup: A Selection by Nathaniel Benchley of His Favorites

Whether providing program notes for you to read while the Mezzo changes her mantilla (and she always has more mantillas than songs), providing a cut-and-paste for Dreiser's next American Tragedy (complete with maps, recipes, and court transcripts), or simply describing The Wreck of The Sunday Paper, Robert Benchley proved that comedy could be witty, sophisticated, and yet completely unpretentious. His scale was Seinfeldian, but far from being the eminently hittable Suburban Snot, Benchely admits to being as confused about the deritus of daily life as the rest of us. And like the rest of us, he finds it amazing that we make it from one day to the next with our lives, and even some shreds of our dignity, intact. He likes opera music, but knows that the plots are wild, trashy, and more than a bit ridiculous. He knows that travelling with kids is a contact sport that only the hardy survive (the hardy usually being the kids themselves), and that Christmas dinner with the extended family is something very pleasant in the abstract but a trial by fire in practice. And he has a sharp eye out for go-getters, lecturers on health and sex, and the pretentious of any sort, all of whom make life even more annoying than it already is. A few of the period details may strike you as quaint, but at heart, this is still very contemporary comedy. And very funny.

This is such a delight: a master of humor takes us on a romp through his life. Think of James Thurber, O. Henry, and the more modern David Sadaris and W. Bruce Cameron. Rich, full, delightful humor, all based on the human condition. This is a collection of essays that is absolutely timeless, as funny now as when they were originally written.

I only found out about Benchley from a short book on Algonquin Round table quotes but I'm very thankful for it--it's shameful that Benchley has basically been forgotten. Why on earth should such a gifted, briliant comic writer be so little known nowadays? There's simply no reason I can think of. He's just as good as Perelman or Thurber, and he deserves much wider reading. This anthology is a pretty good collection of his work, featuring most of his more popular and beloved pieces. What one notices about Benchley is that he really isn't quite so gentle and affectionate in his humor as those who remember him say--he was the original master of what he termed the "dementia praecox" (crazy written humor basically)and when he applies this to ordinary life or parodies bad writing he can be quite cutting. His style is just about perfect--simple but carefully constructed to wring every laugh it can out of subtleties of phrasing and syntax. His parodies of academic writing are among the greatest ever, effortlessly exposing the bad ideas, pretension and willful obfuscation that lurk beyond so many professors' works. His humor is that of a good natured man so bewildered with the modern world that he defends himself with humor, and depending upon the situation that humor can be quietly observant or fast and crazy, therefore reducing its target to nonsense as well. This book needs to be re-printed with a beter cover, and it wouldn't hurt to add more stories to make it a definitive overview of the man's work. Having done so, the book should be aggresively marketed so that it ends up in the humor section of every bookshop in the land. It's the least Benchley, one our greatest American comic writers, deserves.

I love Benchley's work. I began reading "My Ten Years in a Quandary..." as a child at the cottage nearly forty years ago. I can still read that tattered book and enjoy it immensely. I am less thrilled by this compilation--can't always agree with Nathaniel Benchley's choices and miss some of Gluyas Williams sketches that have been dropped. Get one of the original collections--starting with, if you want, "My Ten Years..." and then, when you decide that you want everything the man ever wrote, you won't be buying stories you already have.

"A great many people have come up to me and asked me how I manage to get so much work done while looking so dissipated. My answer is 'Don't you wish you knew?' and a pretty good answer it is, too, when you consider that nine times out of ten I didn't hear the original question." That's Benchley. Note the easy, flowing, understated prose (read: no disgusting postmodern Latinizing) that marked this extraordinary humorist's observations on life in America and abroad. Benchley wrote about everything, and everything he wrote showed the same magical mix of cynicism and whimsy.