Review by Roger Bishop
An original member of the Algonquin Round Table, Robert Benchley was known to readers of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Life, Collier's, and other publications from the twenties through the mid-forties as drama critic, essayist, book reviewer, and, above all, as humorist. In the late twenties he reached many others with the first of almost 50 short subjects for the movies (one, How to Sleep, won an Academy Award in 1935) and later in nearly 40 feature films as actor or screenwriter. Benchley was one of the chief architects of what his friend Donald Ogden Stewart (The Philadelphia Story) called "crazy humor," which one writer called "mental joyriding" and another "stuff that just sprung from a fertile, open-minded imagination."
Billy Altman brings the world of Benchley and his friends -- Dorothy Parker, Robert Sherwood, Charles MacArthur, Marc Connelly, among many others -- vividly to life in his insightful and readable Laughter's Gentle Soul: The Life of Robert Benchley.
American society was in the midst of extraordinary change in the 1920s and it was a golden age for witty, urbane, sophisticated magazine writers like Harvard-educated, fun-loving Benchley. He thrived in this atmosphere of speakeasies and salons. But as his reputation grew and the demands on him increased, he became more and more an absentee husband and father and went from teetotaler to heavy drinker. He saw other women. Altman takes us on the highs and lows of this roller coaster ride for Benchley and those close to him.
"I am not a writer and not an actor," Benchley told Harold Ross. "I don't know what I am." Despite successful careers as both, there was some truth to his statement. Benchley on himself as a writer: "I do not think of myself as a writer in the technical sense of the word . . . The only technique which I ever remember trying to master was that which was impressed on me in my first job -- writing advertising copy . . ."
Altman helps us understand how both E.B. White and James Thurber saw Benchley as "part idol, part role model, and part teacher." "He had written about practically everything," noted Thurber, "and his comic devices were easy to fall into. White once showed me something he'd written and asked anxiously, 'Did Benchley say that?' "
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