Word: benchley
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ALMOST nobody writes humorous essays any more, perhaps because the world has become too serious a place. Robert Benchley is gone, and James Thurber is gone, but S.J. Perelman comes forth periodically to reassure us that the art is not yet dead...
...that what he is giggling at is a shaggy story-nothing so apocalyptically sneaky, of course, as John Huston's deathless Beat the Devil, but a piece of fine hairy humor all the same. Deftly adapted by Ruth Brooks Flippen and Bruce Geller from a novel by Nat Benchley, Ship is tautly run by Director Irving Brecher, and it carries a competent crew of supporting players: Robert Wagner, Dolores Hart, Frankie Avalon, Frank Gorshin. Naturally, the captain is always in charge. One minute he cheerily pours whisky on his Wheaties. The next, when the mink he gives the broad...
...Thomas Mann, Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley and Dr. James Bryant Conant, former president of Harvard, have all appeared in the Review. The Review's range of interest is wide, running all the way from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter ("Law and Order") to the late Humorist Robert Benchley ("The Typical New Yorker"). The Review was one of the first U.S. publications outside of little poetry magazines to publish the singular verses of French Poet Saint-John Perse-who went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1960. The current anniversary issue features a political reminiscence by Dean Acheson...
Other literary sons-John Phillips Marquand, Nathaniel Benchley, Klaus Mann -have tried with indifferent success to write like Dad. Auberon Waugh conies closer than any of them to pulling it off: at first glance, The Foxglove Saga could pass for a sequel to Decline and Fall. Like Evelyn's first novel, The Saga opens in an English boys' school and is a picaresque, loosely jointed account of several old school chums as they lurch through a succession of army camps, prisons, hospitals and asylums. The characters are often almost the same as in Decline and Fall...
...humorist actually most closely akin to Jean Kerr, at her best, is Robert Benchley. As writers, they share the same gently shrugging quality that utterly preludes malice, the same preoccupation with the bizarre edges of the commonplace, the same disarming penchant for self-deprecation, as when the ample Mrs. Kerr compares herself to "a large bran muffin" or Benchley calls himself "Sweet Old Bob, or sometimes just the initials...