Robert Benchley - Humor Style

Humor Style

Benchley's humor was molded during his time at Harvard. While his skills as an orator were already known by classmates and friends, it was not until his work at the Lampoon that his style formed. The prominent styles of humor were then "crackerbarrel," which relied on devices such as dialects and a disdain for formal education in the style of humorists such as Artemis Ward and Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, and a more "genteel" style of humor, very literary and upper-class in nature, a style popularized by Oliver Wendell Holmes. While the two styles were, at first glance, diametrically opposed, they coexisted in magazines such as Vanity Fair and Life. The Lampoon primarily used the latter style, which suited Benchley. While some of his pieces would not have been out of place in a crackerbarrel-style presentation, Benchley's reliance on puns and wordplay resonated more with the literary humorists, as shown by his success with The New Yorker, known for the highbrow tastes of its readers.

Benchley’s definition of humor was simplicity itself: “Anything that makes people laugh.” His favorite nursery rhyme was "One, two / Buckle my shoe."

Benchley's characters were typically exaggerated representations of the common man. They were designed to create a contrast between himself and the masses, who had less common sense. The character is often befuddled by many of the actions of society and is often neurotic in a "different" way—the character in How to Watch Football, for instance, finds it sensible for a normal fan to forgo the live experience and read the recap in the local papers. This character, labeled the "Little Man" and in some ways similar to many of Mark Twain's protagonists, was based on Benchley himself; the character did not persist in Benchley's writing past the early 1930s, but survived in his speaking and acting roles. This character was apparent in Benchley's Ivy Oration during his Harvard graduation ceremonies, and would appear throughout his career, such as during "The Treasurer's Report" in the 1920s and his work in feature films in the 1930s.

Topical, current-event style pieces written for Vanity Fair during the war did not lose their levity, either. He was not afraid to poke fun at the establishment (one piece he wrote was titled "Have You a Little German Agent in Your Home?"), and his common man observations often veered into angry rants, such as his piece "The Average Voter," where the namesake of the piece "orgets what the paper said...so votes straight Republicrat ticket." His lighter fare did not hesitate to touch upon topical issues, drawing analogies between a football game and patriotism, or chewing gum and diplomacy and economic relations with Mexico.

In his films, the common man exaggerations continued. Much of his time in the films was spent spoofing himself, whether it was the affected nervousness of the treasurer in The Treasurer's Report or the discomfort in explaining The Sex Life of the Polyp to a women's club. The longer, plot-driven shorts, such as Lesson Number One, Furnace Trouble, and Stewed, Fried and Boiled, likewise show a Benchley character overmatched by seemingly mundane tasks. Even the more stereotypical characters held these qualities, such as the incapable sportscaster Benchley played in The Sport Parade.

Benchley's humor inspired a number of later humorists and filmmakers. Dave Barry, author, onetime humor writer for the Miami Herald, and judge of the 2006 and 2007 Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor, has called Benchley his "idol" and he "always wanted to write like ." Horace Digby claimed that, "ore than anyone else, Robert Benchley influenced early writing style." Outsider filmmaker Sidney N. Laverents lists Benchley as an influence as well, and James Thurber used Benchley as a reference point, citing Benchley's penchant for presenting "the commonplace as remarkable" in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.