Word: benchleys
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...MONUMENT by Nathaniel Benchley. 249 pages. McGraw-Hill...
Nathaniel Benchley novels all have a faintly spurious ring, like canned laughter or the new 25? piece. That is because Benchley's plots generally straddle the line of plausibility. Like most of his eight other novels, The Monument depends on readers who are willing to believe the unbelievable. Its story deals with a campaign to build a Korean War memorial in Hawley, a little inbred New England town on the Atlantic shore. Even before the selectmen vote on it, this modest proposal nourishes more intrigues than the Orient Express and incites more violence, including suicide and murder, than...
Until recently, many American humorists obeyed that caveat by looking the other way when the subject was raised, or treating the whole thing as a joke. Robert Benchley spoke for most of his colleagues when he lampooned the scientific students of humor with his dictum: "We must understand that all sentences which begin with W are funny." Well, something unfunny has happened to American humor. Today the humorists are outexamining the examiners, some of them even making second careers as commentators who probe and pontificate on the radio and TV panels that ceaselessly sift American manners, morals and mores...
...impact on the campus, where a news-hungry generation that has been in on the information explosion since the beginning finds the gentle, sophisticated comedies of the '30s and '40s relics to be viewed on the museum of the Late Show. Their memories are less of Benchley than of Berkeley, and, in the absence of much protest humor, they have concentrated on deliberate absurdities that refuse to deal with the adult world. Such were the elephant jokes (What do you get when you cross an elephant with a jar of peanut butter? A peanut that never forgets...
...quality of TV comedy leaves something to be desired, the quantity of written humor is pitifully small; most writers with a comic talent have been lured by the wide exposure and high pay of TV. No replacements have been found for such essayists as Benchley, Ring Lardner, Don Marquis. Frank Sullivan. There is no longer a Thurber, expressing in word and picture the uneasiness of modern life and the war between the sexes. "Funny men don't seem to write books these days," laments Russell Baker. Nightclub humor-what there is of it-is also in bad shape...