Bon Mots, Wisecracks, and Gags

by Robert E. Drennan

  “With the increase in crime during the past decade has come a corresponding increase in crime prevention. Or perhaps it is vice versa.”

  Influenced by an irrepressible New England conscience regarding sex, Benchley expressed outward disapproval of sensationalism as a marketable commodity in the theater. Discussing the play Ception Shoals, starring Nazim-ova, Benchley found the production “too obstetric for my simple soul,” and referred to its starring lady as the play’s “leading spermatozoa.”

  In 1930, Benchley commented on his reputation as a bad businessman, a weakness he readily admitted: “Of course, if I wanted to, I might point out that out of a possible $5,000 which I have made since I left school I have had $3,000 worth of good food (all of which has gone into making bone and muscle and some nice fat), $1,500 worth of theater tickets, and $500 worth of candy; whereas many of my business friends have simply had $5,000 worth of whatever that stock was which got so yellow along about last November.”

  Benchley spent a short, highly unsuccessful apprenticeship in the advertising department of Curtis Publishing Company, about which he recalled: “When I left Curtis (I was given plenty of time to get my hat and coat) ! was advised not to stick to advertising. They said I was too tall, or something. I forget just what the reason was they gave.”

  On a summer vacation trip Benchley arrived in Venice and immediately wired a friend: “Streets flooded. Please advise,”

  Benchley once wrote a magazine article called “I Like to Loaf,” When the editor received the piece a full two weeks late, it included a note which read: “I was loafing.”

  After lunching with a friend one afternoon at a Manhattan restaurant, Benchley insisted on paying the check but the friend objected with equal determination. Beckoning to the waiter, Benchley said, “Don’t pay any attention to my nephew. He spent his allowance last night at the roller rink.”

  ‘The advantage of keeping family accounts is clear. If you do not keep them, you are uneasily aware of the fact that you are spending more than you are earning. If you do keep them, you know it.”

  “Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of.”

  “A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.”

  Discussing a Broadway show: “It was one of those plays in which all the actors unfortunately enunciated very clearly.”

  ON SLEEP: “If we can develop some way in which a man can doze (in public) and still keep from making a monkey of himself, we have removed one of the big obstacles to human happiness in modern civilization.”

  “There is a certain type of citizen (a great many times, I am sorry to have to say, one of the fair sex) whose lack of civic pride shows itself in divers forms, but it is in the devastation of a Sunday newspaper that it reaches full bloom. Show me a Sunday paper which has been left in a condition fit only for kite flying, and I will show you an antisocial and dangerous character who has left it that way.”

  “In Milwaukee last month a man died laughing over one of his own jokes. That’s what makes it so tough for us outsiders. We have to fight home competition.”

  “You have no idea how many problems an author has to face during those feverish days when he is building a novel, and you have no idea how he solves them. Neither has he.”

  Coming out of a midtown restaurant, Benchley spotted a uniformed man at the door. “Would you get us a taxi, please,” he asked the man. “Fm sorry,” the man said coldly, “I happen to be a rear admiral in the United States Navy.” “All right, then,” said Benchley, “get us a battleship.”

  Six days after Lindbergh’s historic flight to LeBourget, Benchley sent a telegram to his friend Charles Brackett in Paris: “Any tidings of Lindbergh? Left here week ago. Am worried.”

  Benchley and Dorothy Parker shared a tiny $30-a-month office for a time in the Metropolitan Opera House studios. As Benchley described it, “One cubic foot less of space and it would have constituted adultery.”

  “It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”

  On the death of a Hollywood movie queen whose sensational love-life had been highly publicized, Benchley suggested an epitaph: “She sleeps alone at last.”

  Once, when asked whether he knew the six-foot-seven playwright Robert Sherwood, Benchley climbed onto a chair and extended his hand to just below the ceiling: “Why, I’ve known Bob Sherwood since he was this high.”

  At one point during the twenties most of the Round Tablers were finding personal success for the first time. “It must be a boom,” observed Georges, the Algonquin’s headwaiter; “they order ice cream on top of everything,” Benchley added calmly, “And then they grab their lollipops and pitter-patter over to their psychiatrists.”

  In the hospital just before he died, Benchley occupied himself in reading a book of philosophical essays called The Practical Cogitator, or, The Thinker s Anthology The last essay he read, by James Harvey Robinson, was titled “Am I Thinking?” A marginal notation beside the title read: “No. (And supposing you were?)”

  Abie’s Irish Rose, one of the most spectacular smash-hits in Broadway history, was panned by most serious theater critics. Benchley was adamant in his opinion of it: “The Rotters [also a notoriously poor play] is no longer the worst play in town! Abie’s Irish Rose has just opened/” His subsequent comments about the show during its record ran from June of 1922 to November of 1927 included these:

  “People laugh at this every night, which explains why democracy can never be a success.”

  “In another two or three years, well have this play driven out of town.”

  “Where do people come from who keep this going? You don’t see them out in the daytime.”

  “We were only fooling all the time. It’s a great show.” Then, much later:

  “We might as well say it now as later. We don’t like this play.”

  Recalling his college days, Benchley once made up a list of lessons learned during his four-year stint. Following are a few examples of knowledge he noted as gained during his freshman year:

  1. Charlemagne either died or was born or did something with the Holy Roman Empire in 800.

  2. By placing one paper bag inside another paper bag you can carry home a milkshake in it.

  3. There is a double “1” in the middle of “parallel.”

  4. Powder rubbed on the chin will take the place of a shave if the room isn’t very light.

  5. French nouns ending in “aison” are feminine.

  6. Almost everything you need to know about a subject is in the encyclopedia.

  Five days before sailing on a trip to Europe, Benchley decided to take his mother along—she was then 79—so that she might visit her niece and nephew-in-law in Paris. Benchley cabled the couple ahead of time: “MOTHER WANTS TO KNOW WHETHER TO BRING HER BICYCLE.”

  A scene in one of his numerous movie shorts required Benchley to be strung up in a mess of telephone wires above a city street. While waiting for the final camera, he called to his wife, Gertrude, who was on location: “Remember how good in Latin I was in school?”

  “I do,” she replied.

  “Well, look where it got me.”

  “It takes no great perspicacity to detect and to complain of the standardization in American life. So many foreign and domestic commentators have pointed this feature out in exactly the same terms that the comment has become standardized and could be turned out by the thousands on little greeting cards, all from the same type-form: ‘American life has become too standardized.’”

  In a piece called “Literary Lost and Found Department” Benchley parodied the literary queries in the New York Times Book Review. Here is one of his entries:

  K.L.F.-—Who wrote the following and what does it mean?

  “Oh, de golden wedding,

  Oh, de golden wedding,

  Oh, de golden wedding,

  De golden, golde
n wedding!”

  A friend once told Benchley that a particular drink he was drinking was slow poison, to which Benchley replied, “So who’s in a hurry?”

  One young lady who occasionally visited the Round Table was known to have made several half-hearted attempts at suicide. After one of her recent efforts Bench-ley cautioned her: “You want to go easy on this suicide stuff. First thing you know, you’ll ruin your health.”

  Arriving home with a group of friends one rainy evening, Benchley suggested (though some have attributed the remark to Aleck Woollcott), “Let’s get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.”

  “I haven’t been abroad in so long that I almost speak English without an accent.”

  “In America there are two classes of travel—first class and with children.”

  “The biggest obstacle to professional writing today is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.”

  “My college education was no haphazard affair. My courses were all selected with a very definite aim in view, with a serious purpose in mind—no classes before eleven in the morning or after two-thirty in the afternoon, and nothing on Saturday at all—on that rock was my education built.”

  Commenting on the fact that one measure suggested to aid in reducing automobile accidents was the prohibition of gasoline sales to drunk drivers, Benchley made a list of infallible symptoms of intoxication in drivers—for the benefit of gas-station attendants. Following are some of the key symptoms:

  When the driver is sitting with his back against the instrument panel and his feet on the driver’s seat.

  When the people in the back seat are crouched down on the floor with their arms over their heads.

  When the driver points to the gas-tank and says, “A pound of liver, please.”

  If the driver insists that the gas-station man take the driver’s seat while he (the driver) fills the tank, first exchanging hats.

  When the driver goes into the rest-room and doesn’t come out.

  When the driver is alone and stark naked.

  When there is no driver at all.

  “Merely as an observer of natural phenomena, I am fascinated by my own personal appearance. This doesn’t mean that I am pleased with it, mind you, or that I can even tolerate it. 1 simply have a morbid interest in it.”

  In Hollywood on a warm, bright day Benchley was found by a friend sitting under a sun-lamp in his room. When the friend asked why he didn’t go outside to get his sun, Benchley exclaimed, “And get hit by a meteor?”

  While a student at Harvard, Benchley came across a final exam question that read: “Discuss the arbitration of the international fisheries problem in respect to hatcheries protocol and dragnet and trawl procedure as it affects (a) the point of view of the United States, and (b) the point of view of Great Britain.”

  Benchley answered with a mixture of directness and evasion: “I know nothing about the point of view of Great Britain in the arbitration of the international fisheries problem, and nothing about the point of view of the United States. Therefore I shall discuss the question from the point of view of the fish.”

  “I do most of my work sitting down. That’s where I shine.”

  “There are several ways in which to apportion the family income, all of them unsatisfactory.”

  “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing”

  Leaving Hollywood’s Garden of Allah Hotel to return to New York, Benchley handed out final tips to everyone who had waited on him, after which he was approached by a doorman he hadn’t seen during his entire stay. “Aren’t you going to remember me?” the doorman asked, holding out his hand. “Why, of course,” Benchley answered, “I’ll write you every day.”

  After graduating from Harvard, Benchley took a job for a time organizing employee clambakes for a Boston paper company. Reminiscing about this brief occupation, Benchley confessed, “I’ve never looked a clam in the face since.”

  “A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. My answer is, ‘Don’t you wish you knew?’ and a pretty good answer it is, too, when you consider that nine times out of ten I didn’t hear the original question.”

  In his book The Time of Laughter Corey Ford relates a story that took place when Benchley was serving as an editor on the old Life. During that period, Ford himself was contributing articles to Life, and by coincidence another writer, named Torrey Ford, was doing the same. Corey asked Benchley’s advice on how to avoid confusion of identities, and Benchley suggested, “You could print your stuff in a different color ink, but that might run into expense. Maybe the best idea would be to let Torrey handle the articles, and you handle the checks.”

  Benchley was known for carrying on a constant war with machines and inanimate objects, always coming out the loser. Once he wrote: ‘The hundred and one little bits of wood and metal that go to make up the impedimenta of our daily life . . . each and every one are bent on my humiliation and working together, as on one great team, to bedevil and confuse me and to get me into a neurasthenics’ home before I am sixty. I can’t fight these boys. They’ve got me licked.”

  Robert Sherwood told a story about Benchley which took place when both they and Dorothy Parker were working for Vanity Fair. The magazine followed a policy—which the three young editors found undignified and rather childish—requiring tardy employees to explain the reason for their lateness on cards. One morning Benchley arrived late; he promptly filled out both sides of a card, explaining that he had been “detained by rounding up a herd of elephants that had escaped from the Hippodrome,” which resulted in his being eleven minutes late getting to work.

  Benchley loved parties and invariably managed to be the last guest to leave. He was somewhat piqued by the way certain people could arise with no trouble, say something like “I guess it’s time to be going,” and leave. Once he commented, “I can’t seem to bring myself to say, ‘Well I guess I’ll be toddling along . . .’ It isn’t that I can’t toddle. It’s that I can’t guess I’ll toddle.”

  Heywood Broun

  HEYWOOD BROUN [1888—193g], as columnist for several New York papers, was as an ardent crusader for the underdog. He championed many causes through his “It Seems to Me” column, which ran for a twenty-year period. In it, he attacked such things as capital punishment, labor spies, Mayor RolpKs approval of San Jose lynchings. He pleaded for Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottshoro boys, and the Gastonia strikers, and, with Dorothy Parker, headed the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee to raise funds for Spanish Republicans. His article “A Union for Reporters” roused that formerly indifferent group into forming the American Newspaper Guild, of which he became president (1933). A man of huge physical proportions and a strikingly unkempt appearance, he was once described as “a peculiarly lovable mass of contradictions . . . soft-hearted, steel-minded, brave and terrified, considerate and tough, gregarious and solitary” Possessed of a clever wit, Broun was generally reflective and philosophical but when dealing with social injustice he was capable of harshness. He began his newspaper career as drama critic for the New York World.

  At a newsmen’s banquet President Harding appeared as guest speaker and delivered what struck Broun as the epitome of cliché-ridden, ghost-written addresses. After a brief moment of respectful applause, Broun rose from his chair and cried, “Author! Author!”

  Appearing bleary-eyed and sleepless at a Chicago convention, Broun remarked: “I came out in a lower from New York and couldn’t sleep a wink: a dwarf in the upper above me kept chasing up and down all night.”

  As a play reviewer Broun was usually gentle, but one actor’s performance so displeased him that he was moved to classify the young man, Geoffrey Steyne, as the worst actor on the American stage. Steyne sued, but the case was dismissed. The next time Broun reviewed a play in which Steyne appeared, he made no mention of the actor until the last sentence, which read, “Mr. Steyne’s per
formance was not up to its usual standard.”

  In 1935, Broun made this statement: “Nobody need worry any more that Washington is going left. Indeed, nobody need worry that the Washington of today is going anywhere.”

  Broun, known for his always unkempt appearance, devoted an article to the topic “Best-Dressed Women of the World” In it he commented on his own experience in such contests: “While I was running for Best-Dressed Senior in the graduating class of Horace Mann High School I often spent as much as three or four minutes in the morning deciding which pants I ought to wear. They grey or the blue. The blue or the grey. I generally decided to take the ones which possessed the closest approach to a crease.”

  On a voyage across the Pacific, Broun and his fellow passengers one day decided to provide-themselves with an evening of entertainment. Heywood was asked to box three rounds with a man whose stature closely matched his own 240-pound frame. Before accepting the offer, Heywood engaged the other fellow in a chat, presumably to discover what he was up against. In the course of their talk, the man said to Heywood, “I’m going to ask you a question which I have wanted to ask someone ever since I got on this ship. What is this ‘demitasse’ they have on the bill of fare?” Heywood later sought out the chairman of the entertainment committee and announced, “I’ve changed my mind about boxing with that chap. Any man who doesn’t know what a ‘demitasse’ is must be a tough guy.”