The Benchley Roundup

Robert Benchley’s wit appears effortless–it is a blend of autobiography, satire, the inconsequential, and the sudden surprise. At the start of “Fall In!” he muses, “It may be because I do not run as fast, or as often, as I used to, but I seem to be way behind on my parades. It must be almost a year since I saw one, and then I was in it myself.” At one time Benchley was everywhere, a prolific reviewer and ubiquitous actor and screenwriter; now we must be grateful for his son’s selection of humorous sketches. The Algonquian witster remains as brilliantly nonplused as ever as he observes his species in all its skewed play–from football’s confusions to the folly of footnoters to French for Americans. When Benchley declared, “The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him,” he can surely not have been looking to himself. James Thurber’s remark seems “One of the greatest fears of the humorous writer is that he has spent three weeks writing something done faster and better by Benchley in 1919.”