Word: benchley
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Robert C. Benchley, literary buffoon of the brightest motley, is deserting the third row, aisle (critic's seat) for the opposite side of the footlights. It became public property last week that Life's theatrical commentator has accepted an engagement with the forthcoming Music Box Revue...
...Benchley's metropolitan theatrical experience includes brief appearances in No, Sirree and The 49ers. Both were melanges stirred together by the critics for the benefit of themselves and their friends. His act "in one" (all by himself) where he comes before the curtain and reads the Treasurer's report of finances, is rated as supreme burlesque. He will repeat it in the Music Box and do a bit with Frank Tinney, as well...
...humorists?Cobb, Adams, Benchley, Connelly, Broun, Stewart...
...done that; but, after all, his humor is Brobdingnagian. It partakes of brown gravy, and of cream puffs thrown wantonly. F. P. A. is occasionally human, though at times he seems to become the war sage looking at life through the war glasses of an ironist. Robert C. Benchley is almost human. Perhaps if I could see him weep once, I should actually believe in his humanity. Thomas Masson is human; but his humor is the genial story. He is the raconteur. He is not a nifty hound like Marc Connelly, nor a worshiper of the sentimentally bizarre like Heywood...
...Eliot as the greatest modern American poet, his vogue is vanishing amid an incessant attack and counterblast of the younger literati themselves. The authors of The Forty-Niners (recent dramatic fiasco) eat lunch four times a week with the young critics, but they did not save Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Marc Connolly, and Ring Lardner from a sound critical lashing. Heywood Broun's novel The Boy Grew Older was enthusiastically welcomed by the older and more conventional reviewers, but Broun's friends ridiculed and disparaged it as viciously as if it had been written by Zane Grey...