Robert Benchley

Robert Charles Benchley (September 15, 1889 – November 21, 1945) was an American humorist, newspaper columnist, film actor, and drama literary editor.

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, Benchley's essays were published in collections including Of All Things, Benchley Beside Himself, Inside Benchley, Benchley or Else, and Chips Off the Old Benchley. His books were illustrated by Gluyas Williams, whose spare, knowing line drawings added to Benchley's success.

Benchley's humor was based on everyday life, news oddities, and absurd, almost surreal essays such as his "Uncle Edith" series. At Harvard, he was a leading contributor to the Harvard Lampoon. With Dorothy Parker and Robert E. Sherwood, his colleagues at Vanity Fair magazine, Benchley formed the Algonquin Round Table. He was an early and regular contributor to the New Yorker Magazine, Life magazine and a humor columnist for the Hearst Corporation Newspapers. His style influenced other humorists such as S. J. Perelman and James Thurber. Benchley is cited as an inspiration by humorists like Bob Newhart, Erma Bombeck, Woody Allen and Shelly Berman and others. The Robert Benchley Society gives an annual humor award in Benchley's honor. Judges of the event include: Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry who said Benchley influenced him more than anyone other than Barry's own mother; and 2005 Benchley Society Award Winner Horace J. Digby.

Film work

In 1928, Benchley starred in The Treasurer's Report, a short comedy film that was possibly the first all-talkie film shown in theaters (as opposed to The Jazz Singer (1927), which was primarily silent, and The Lights of New York (later in 1928), the first full-length talkie feature film). This led to a series of more than three dozen comedic instructional short films whose titles frequently began with "How to…". Each featured Benchley as a lecturer or as his family man alter ego, Joe Doakes. How to Sleep (1935) won an Academy Award in 1936.

At the same time, he found frequent work, at several studios, as a character actor in feature films, often playing a variation on the befuddled burgher of his shorts or else a dipsomaniacal sophisticate. He appears in Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, in Rene Clair's I Married a Witch and with Fred Astaire in The Sky's the Limit.

One of Benchley's specialties in film was the "embarrassing speech" -- nervous, stammering, clearing his throat, making no sense whatsoever. It's the nightmare of every friend of the groom or business analyst who must give a talk and finds his mind has gone completely blank... painfully funny to watch.

Benchley also appeared in the 1941 feature film The Reluctant Dragon, giving a loose tour of the then-new Walt Disney Studios facility in Burbank, California.

Benchley was awarded a star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood. He is the father of author Nathaniel Benchley author of The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, and grandfather of Jaws writer Peter Benchley.

On his passing in 1945, Robert Benchley was cremated and his ashes were interred in the family plot at Prospect Hill Cemetery in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

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