Word: benchleys
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
Parody may well be at its most uselessly enjoyable when the parodist is a century away from his subject. Since I bought this anthology I have grown very fond of Robert Benchley's Christmas Afternoon...
...Benchley was associated with the New Yorker, and as MacDonald points out, so also were nearly all the good parodists of this century: Peter de Vries, Wolcott Gibbs, Frank Sullivan, and E. B. White. Their victims' language is pleasantly familiar, and for that modern parodies seem the funniest. One probably has to be a kind of literary snob to appreciate parody anyway, and although we are often told solemnly that parody must be funny in itself and not just because it mocks something, it is very satisfying to recognise a small and particular bit of cleverness. Of the contemporary rash...
...night court. To honor the 50th anniversary in the theater of Actress Peggy Wood (Bittersweet, Blithe Spirit), ANTA last week collected round her most of the remaining members of the much-chronicled Algonquin Round Table. The late great wits were missing, of course-Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams, Robert Benchley, Herman Mankiewicz-and, significantly, the reunion was held not at the old rear-center table in the Rose Room of the Algonquin but in the grand ballroom of Manhattan's Hotel Edison, five blocks and 90 light-years away. The most notable living absentees were George S. Kaufmann...
Billy almost never does, on screen or off. Inside a head that makes him look like a benevolent old bullfrog resides a restless imagination, a "flypaper memory" and a wit that ranges from the merry to the mordant. Wilder, not Benchley, was the man who first said: "Wait till I slip out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini." He is also the author of this scathing epigram: "I would worship the ground you walk on if you lived in a better neighborhood...