Robert Charles Benchley was born on September 15, 1889, and died on November 21, 1945. He was an American writer, newspaper columnist, and actor. He began his career at The Harvard Lampoon while studying at Harvard University. Later, he wrote essays and articles for magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and created well-received short films. His unique sense of humor earned him respect from his peers, including members of the Algonquin Round Table in New York City and other writers in the growing film industry.
Benchley is best known for his work with The New Yorker. His essays, whether about current events or strange and silly topics, inspired many later humorists. He also became famous in Hollywood for his short film How to Sleep, which won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject in 1935. He appeared in movies such as Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Nice Girl? (1941). He also acted as himself in Walt Disney’s The Reluctant Dragon (1941), a movie showing how films are made. His legacy includes his written works and many film appearances.
Life and career
Robert Benchley was born on September 15, 1889, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was the second son of Charles Henry Benchley and Maria Jane (Moran). His father had Welsh ancestry, and his mother had Northern Irish (Protestant) ancestry. Both families had roots in colonial history. His older brother, Edmund, was thirteen years older than Robert. Benchley later wrote imaginative stories about himself, including one in which he claimed to have written A Tale of Two Cities before being buried at Westminster Abbey.
Robert’s father served in the Union army for two years during the Civil War and later worked in the Navy for four years before returning to Worcester. He married and became a town clerk. Benchley’s grandfather, Henry Wetherby Benchley, was a member of the Massachusetts Senate and Lieutenant Governor in the 1850s. He later moved to Texas and worked to help enslaved people escape via the Underground Railroad. He was arrested for this work.
Robert’s older brother, Edmund, was born on March 3, 1876. In 1898, Edmund was a cadet at West Point when his class graduated early to support the Spanish–American War. He died on July 1, 1898, during the Battle of San Juan Hill. When the family learned of his death, Robert’s mother cried, “Why couldn’t it have been Robert?!” It is unclear if Robert, who was nine years old at the time, heard this.
Edmund’s fiancée, Lillian Duryea, a wealthy woman, cared for Robert for many years. Her support may have influenced Robert’s later views on peace. Because Edmund died during a July 4th celebration, Robert always associated fireworks with his brother’s death.
Robert met Gertrude Darling in high school in Worcester. They became engaged during his senior year at Harvard University and married in June 1914. Their first child, Nathaniel Benchley, was born the next year. A second son, Robert Benchley Jr., was born in 1919.
Robert attended South High School in Worcester and participated in academic and traveling theater productions. With financial help from Lillian Duryea, he attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire for his final year of high school. He enjoyed the school’s creative activities, which affected his academic performance later.
Benchley entered Harvard University in 1908, again with Duryea’s help. He joined the Delta Upsilon fraternity and continued to be active in creative activities. He did well in English and government classes. His humor and talent for impressions made him popular among classmates and professors. His performances earned him local recognition, and he was invited to participate in many campus and off-campus events.
During his first two years at Harvard, Benchley worked for the publications Harvard Advocate and Harvard Lampoon. He was elected to the Lampoon’s board of directors in his third year, which was unusual because he was the art editor, not a top writer. This position opened other opportunities, such as joining the Signet Society and becoming the only undergraduate member of the Boston Papyrus Club.
Along with his work at the Lampoon, Benchley acted in theatrical productions, including The Crystal Gazer and Below Zero. He held the position of κροκόδιλος (Crocodilos) for the Pudding in 1912. After college, an English professor, Charles Townsend Copeland, encouraged Benchley to become a writer. Benchley and illustrator Gluyas Williams from the Lampoon considered doing freelance work. Another professor suggested he speak with the Curtis Publishing Company, but Benchley initially refused and took a job in Philadelphia. Because of an academic failure during his senior year due to illness, Benchley did not receive his Bachelor of Arts until 1913. He completed a paper on the U.S.–Canadian Fisheries Dispute, written from the perspective of a fish. He soon began working for Curtis Publishing.
After graduating, Benchley did copy work for Curtis during the summer and translated French catalogs for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In September 1913, he became a full-time staff member, preparing content for Obiter Dicta, a new Curtis publication. The first issue was criticized for being too technical and lacking humor. A failed joke at a company banquet worsened his relationship with his superiors. Benchley continued to try to develop his style, but he eventually left Curtis after being offered a better-paying job in Boston.
In the years that followed, Benchley held several similar jobs. His public speaking career began in 1914 during the Harvard–Yale football game, where he performed a joke involving a Chinese-American man pretending to answer questions in Chinese. This event, called “the Chinese professor caper,” increased his fame. He also wrote his first paid article for Vanity Fair in 1914, titled “Hints on Writing a Book,” a parody of non-fiction writing. Though Vanity Fair occasionally published his work, he later accepted a job with the New York Tribune.
At the Tribune, Benchley started as a reporter but struggled to get quotes from other papers. He later found success covering lectures in the city. He was promised a job with the Tribune’s Sunday magazine when it launched and was transferred to its staff. He eventually became the chief writer, producing two articles a week. His work gained attention, and the Tribune editors allowed him to write a signed column.
In 1916, Benchley temporarily replaced P. G. Wodehouse at Vanity Fair, reviewing theater in New York. This inspired creative ideas at the Tribune magazine, such as casting Benchley as a corpse in a play. However, Benchley’s pacifist views clashed with the Tribune’s stance on World War I, and the magazine’s style became too irreverent. In 1917, the Tribune ended the magazine, leaving Benchley without a job.
Algonquin Round Table
The Algonquin Round Table was a group of writers and actors from New York City who met regularly from 1919 to 1929 at the Algonquin Hotel. The group started with Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott when they worked at Vanity Fair. Over time, the group grew to include more than a dozen members from the New York media and entertainment industries, such as playwrights George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, and journalist Heywood Broun, who became well-known for his work during the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. The group became famous because of the attention they received in the media and their work in their fields.
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is a 1994 American film that shows the story of the Round Table from Dorothy Parker’s point of view. In the movie, Campbell Scott plays the role of Robert Benchley.
Humor style
Robert Benchley's sense of humor was shaped during his time at Harvard University. Although he was already known for his speaking skills among classmates and friends, his unique style of humor developed through his work at the Harvard Lampoon. At that time, two main styles of humor were popular. One was called "crackerbarrel," which used dialects and made fun of formal education, similar to writers like Artemus Ward and David Ross Locke, who wrote under the name Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby. The other style was "genteel," which was more literary and upper-class, like the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes. These styles seemed very different, but they both appeared in magazines such as Vanity Fair and Life. The Lampoon mainly used the "genteel" style, which matched Benchley's preferences. While some of his writing could fit the "crackerbarrel" style, Benchley's use of puns and wordplay connected him more with the literary humorists, as seen in his work for The New Yorker, a magazine read by people with high cultural interests.
Benchley believed that humor was simple: "Anything that makes people laugh."
Benchley's characters often exaggerated the traits of everyday people. These characters were meant to highlight the differences between Benchley and the general public. They often felt confused by society and acted in ways that seemed unusual, such as the character in How to Watch Football, who thought it was better to read a newspaper recap of a game than to watch it live. This character, called the "Little Man," was based on Benchley himself and shared similarities with characters created by Mark Twain. This character appeared in Benchley's speeches and films, even though it was not used in his writing after the early 1930s. The "Little Man" was evident in Benchley's Harvard graduation speech, The Ivy Oration, and continued to appear in his work throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
During wartime, Benchley wrote humorous pieces for Vanity Fair that still kept a light tone. He was not afraid to make fun of authority figures, as seen in a piece titled "Have You a Little German Agent in Your Home?" His observations about everyday people sometimes turned into strong criticisms, such as in his piece "The Average Voter," where he wrote that the average voter "forgets what the paper said…so votes straight Republicrat ticket." His lighter pieces also addressed current events, comparing football games to patriotism or chewing gum to diplomacy and economic relations with Mexico.
In his films, Benchley continued to exaggerate the traits of everyday people. Much of his film work involved making fun of himself, such as the nervous treasurer in The Treasurer's Report or the awkward speaker in The Sex Life of the Polyp. Longer, story-driven films like Lesson Number One, Furnace Trouble, and Stewed, Fried and Boiled also featured Benchley's characters struggling with simple tasks. Even characters that seemed more typical, like the clumsy sportscaster in The Sport Parade, showed these traits. Critic Leslie Halliwell praised Benchley for creating a "subtly fantasticated" version of his own sophisticated personality on screen and for entertaining audiences with it.
Benchley's humor influenced many later writers and filmmakers. Dave Barry, a writer for The Miami Herald and a judge for the Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor, called Benchley his "idol" and said he "always wanted to write like [Benchley]." Horace Digby stated that Benchley "influenced [his] early writing style" more than anyone else. Filmmaker Sidney N. Laverents also listed Benchley as an influence, and James Thurber referenced Benchley in his story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, noting Benchley's ability to make the ordinary seem extraordinary. In 1944, Benchley starred as Mitty in a radio version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty for the series This Is My Best.
Works
During his writing career, Benchley created more than 600 essays, which were first collected in twelve volumes. He also appeared in many films, including 48 short treatments that he mostly wrote or co-wrote, as well as many feature films. After his death, Benchley's works have continued to be published in books such as the 1983 Random House collection The Best of Robert Benchley and the 2005 book Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin. This book gathered many of Benchley's popular short films from his time at Paramount, along with other works by fellow humorists and writers Alexander Woollcott and Donald Ogden Stewart.