During the Depression decade, Robert Benchley wrote nearly seventy-five casual essays for the New Yorker, most of which have been collected in the five books he published in the 1930s—The Treasurer’s Report (1930), No Poems (1932), From Bed to Worse (1934), My Ten Years in a Quandary (1936), After 1903—What? (1938). Some of these pieces are brief humorous asides—similar to his contributions of the late 1920s, when he provided many fillers for an issue—some rank among his finest parodies ("How Seamus Commara Met the Banshee"—1932), mock scientific essays ("A Brief Study of Dendrophilia"—1933), false nostalgia ("New Plays for Old"—1930), and the little man’s dreams ("Take the Witness"—1935). Benchley scholarship has taken appropriate notice of these contributions.

Less noted, and certainly uncollected in book form, are some of the best, the funniest, the most intelligent, and the most politically concerned pieces Benchley wrote. During the Thirties, over the pseudonym "Guy Fawkes," forty of his seventy Wayward Press columns appeared. Benchley not only prepared the way for his successor, A. J. Liebling, but also wrote some of the magazine’s strongest political commentary as he questioned newspapers’ coverage of such matters as the Lindbergh kidnapping, peace conferences, red scares, the Roosevelt elections, and the Supreme Court packing struggle.

Even more forgotten are Robert Benchley’s rich exercises in comic appreciation and, sometimes, wry rejection: his Theatre Reviews. After coming over from Vanity Fair in late 1929 and before leaving permanently for Hollywood in early 1940, Benchley wrote close to three hundred and fifty drama reviews for the New Yorker, sometimes treating as many as four plays or musicals per column. He wrote admiringly of actors and actresses and positively of most of the dramatists whose reputations have held up: Ibsen, Coward, O’Casey, O’Neill, Anderson, Kaufman, Howard, Rice, Heilman, Kingsley, Sherwood, Behrman, Green; as a critic he supported strongly the leftist plays of Odets, Blitzstein, Malta, Wexley, Lawson, and the Federal Theatre. (One exception to Benchley’s praise was anything by A. A. Milne; "The Milne Menace," is the head of one of Benchley’s columns.) He reviewed plays each week during the early l930s except for brief periods when other staffers such as E. B. White, Charles Brackett, or Dorothy Parker would cover for him. Later, he shared the column with the man who would

inherit it, Wolcott Gibbs. Benchley reviews are at once trenchant and comic, and many of the greatest humorous effects he ever created appear in these old New Yorker pages. He was superb at this kind of criticocomic writing under pressure, as Parker realized when she tried to fill his slot and ended each column with a plea—"Robert Benchley please come home. Nothing is forgiven"; or "Baby is taking terrible beating." Dorothy Parker is quite explicit: "Not I nor anyone else . . . can do what he does to the drama" (Feb. 21, 28, 1931).

Although most of Robert Benchley’s Wayward Press commentaries are essentially tough-minded and disillusioned criticisms of both contemporary journalistic practices and the contradictions of the American scene, Benchley employs many of the humorous approaches that make his memoirs and parodies some of the finest humorous prose of his time. While he often attacks papers like the New York Times for awkward, overdone, and cliché-ridden coverage of the young Charles Lindbergh or for reportorial venality in writing straight-forwardly respectful stories about, say, Calvin Coolidge in Wild West garb; and despite his fiercely liberal stance when he mocks the Herald Tribune for trying to document a Soviet attempt to stir up a revolt by American blacks or to deny the realities of Roosevelt’s victory over Landon—Benchley can still be warmly funny.

His openings are brisk and absurd. He treats Memorial Day newspapers with affectionate acceptance of the holiday jinx of dullness: "Except for those who are going to march and want to know the course of the parade, the papers on Memorial Day can be used for wrapping without a glance" (June 26, 1932). Benchley’s skill in expanding comic metaphor is often on display. "The Times has, for several years now, maintained its own private hatchery for new-heroes. Selecting the bird when it is very young, the editors have nailed its feet to the ground and stuffed it with selected bits of prepared publicity until it is ready with a large and succulent foie gras featuring a New York Times copyright stamp right on the middle of it. Practically all the polar explorers, planet-detectors, and long-distance fliers . . ." are thus nurtured (April 13, 1930). And Robert Benchley’s particular brand of comic diminution is always in evidence. Since there were no newsworthy items in a Naval Conference, "This left the gigantic press organizations in London with just a little less to do than they previously had. They could either play badminton, go and look at the Italian art exhibition at Burlington House, or choose up sides among themselves and have a hare-and-hounds race. Many of them settled down to writing little themes for their home school papers entitled ‘My Vacation in England’" (Mar. 1, 1930). His own self-mockery tempers his criticisms. Dealing with sports pages’ emotional over-reaction

to Knute Rockne’s death, Benchley uses a familiar self-denigrating ploy to ease in comic fashion his criticism. "The question is whether or not sporting writers are ever to be trusted with matters of a sentimental nature. We are clutching in our chubby fist one black ball, signifying ‘No-no-no!’" (May 2, 1931). The "chubby" is pure Benchley.

Benchley’s basic tone is ironic, satirizing the press’s generally conservative attitude. The irony always shows a genuine wit, which is often heavier than the whimsical approach that distinguishes his comic articles. In a 1930 issue—and he seems to have written nearly the entire magazine—Benchley turns to what he calls the newspapers’ celebration of "Russian Godless Week." Here, he remarks, ". . . it is not too much to say that when the day has arrived on which the New York Times is taken to task for publishing pro-Soviet news we may confidently expect the entire Appalachian range to get up and walk over to the ocean for a dip" (Mar. 1, 1930). There is a feeling of weary sarcasm in his remarks, as in his glance at the 1932 Democratic convention—"The Reportorial Dance Marathon"—which intensely bores this critic of reportage. "But they keep right on doing it, every four years, perspiring and giggling at themselves, until the last peal of the organ has sounded and they sink exhausted to the floor, poorer by sheaves of expense accounts and richer only by several million words which nobody but the copy desk have read" (July 23,1932). One conjectures that this mordant critical outlet released Benchley to be the jolly comic in his more typical essays. Certainly, his anger shows clearly in "The Third-and-a-Half Estate," where he excoriates the press for its mendacious and insensitive handling of the Lindbergh kidnapping (May 7, 1932—the flyer continued to draw Benchley’s attention throughout the decade).

Benchley employs his most savage indignation when discussing matters connected with World War I or any future conflict. A deeply sincere pacifist, he gives his humor a nervous edge as he mentions either reporters’ blandness or nations’ blindness in matters of war and peace. He fiercely attacks, for example, the efforts of a particular journalist who Benchley says "will be pleasantly remembered as the man who got America into the World War by his stirring editorials in the Tribune. He does not feel quite so strongly about this next war, but there is no telling when the old fighting spirit will flare up again, and, having made such a success of his last war, he may be tempted to get the boys into khaki again just for a final fling before the law is passed making editorial and special writers the first ones to be taken up in the draft" (Mar. 1, 1930). Ambrose Bierce could not have put the case more bitterly.

Many press failures peeve Benchley, most often when they involve

some lack of humane response. Even what the papers omit can fall under Benchley’s scorn. Sports: "The football season . . . is over, and we have received our daily news from the various stadia detailing what the scrubs did against the Varsity in Wednesday practice and what the Varsity did against the coaches on Thursday. What we don’t get was that a young man was killed playing football at Brown University on November 1. That probably wouldn’t be considered news" (Dec. 6. 1930). Advertising influence: he hails the fact in "Real News" that advertising or editorial pressures seem not to affect weather reports—but "Possibly, in a few days, the anti-administration papers may set out to prove that the Street Cleaning Department is shot through with graft and inefficiency, but in that glorious day after no reporter need fear getting all the news. . . . Nature doesn’t advertise, though the News may eventually swing her into line" (Mar. 10, 1934). He finds reporters deliberately misleading in "Expert Dope" as far as Roosevelt’s re-election is concerned (Nov. 14, 1936); in "The Sound and the Fury," Benchley terms reportage on the conflict between FDR and the Supreme Court "propaganda by saturation" (Mar. 13, 1937); and—remarkably, from a historicist standpoint— discovers that the coverage of fads takes up all the space in newspapers so that stories of the Nazi persecutions of the Jews are buried. "Vanishing News" is his title for this Wayward Press column, and Benchley goes so far as to hint at a cover-up plot (Dec. 24, 1938).

Irony is Robert Benchley’s special technique in these press analyses. He is devastating on newspapers’ uses of red plot scares to shift the public’s minds from bank failures: "So, thank God, we’re safe from that quarter!" He is mightily amused by writers he calls Christopher Robins creating roguish picture captions of "Snow Flake, Esq. and Family" on a visit to Washington. "We can hardly wait for the first visit of Little Christine Crocus and her family when spring comes to the World offices" (June 10, 1931). What he most laughs at are the lengths to which journalists go to provide copy when there are no newsworthy events. Benchley himself compensates for boredom with typical whimsy—as he does in his Theatre columns—"(Probably between the closing date of this magazine and its appearance on the stands . . . the Reds will have taken the city as far north as Fourteenth Street, and a new mountain range will have sprung up overnight along the Jersey Shore)" (Feb. 7, 1931). Benchley is always alert to one of humor’s staples, the contradictions between genuine beliefs and stated positions. The quick shift of newspapers from support of government action to attacks on government action when NRA regulations threaten the publishers’ positions fascinates the Wayward Press observer. "Guy Fawkes," indeed. The column releases Robert Benchley’s iconoclastic, radical inclinations, and he directly attacks in the same context not editorial matter but slanted news columns that move seamlessly from attacks on Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act to praise for Mussolini’s statism.

While always eschewing theoretical formulations, as drama or journalism critic, Robert Benchley does indicate to the readers the basis for his comical/critical stance, Speaking of the New York Times, Benchley points out that it "on occasion goes out of its way to invite a genial leer from outsiders, and it is on such leers that this department is founded!" (Mar. 8, 1930). Elsewhere, he watches newspapers start to kid one another, "and now, perhaps, our particular mission of vilification will be taken over by the papers themselves" (Sep. 6, 1930, [my italics]). Benchley’s critical self-awareness is one of the hallmarks of his humor, whether mocking himself as the inadequate little man caught in Gluyas Williams’s illustrations to the books—the Robert Benchley of the genial leer—or revealing himself as the angry satirist of social hypocrisy discovered in his direct statements of rueful dismay—the "Guy Fawkes" on a mission of vilification.

As a play reviewer, Robert Benchley is at once the clear, acute critic and the warm, discursive humorist. His basic tone is genial and tolerant. He enjoyed evenings at the theatre (but not restive or tardy audiences), and he is inclined in his reviews to reflect his pleasure by leniency towards actors and playwrights. No abstract conceptualist, he knows what he likes and draws on his practical sense of both good acting and good writing; after all, he was himself both writer and actor.

The persona developed by Benchley in his humorous essays carries over to his theatre work. Benchley the drama critic is always Robert the amiable blunderer. As his essays focus on this silly self, so in a review he can state, "And now, having checked up on the actors, I will check up on myself." He goes on to admit a mistake in a previous column: "My error was nothing but gross, palpitating stupidity. I should go around spying on actors" (April 19, 1930). And he develops this play-going characterization, in the manner, perhaps, of a latter-day Samuel Pepys (Benchley was fascinated by the Queen Anne period, always planning a scholarly book on the subject; he makes no attempt, however, to imitate Pepys in form as was Franklin P. Adams’s wont). After viewing Uncle Vanya, Benchley gets inside his own comic figure. "I love to be depressed by these Russians. As I go out into the street after an evening in one of their high-civilized, mid-Romanoff houses where a lot of people are stuck for the rest of their lives, I feel somehow that I have myself become an object of pity and that people ought to be a little nicer to me from now on. I walk along the street with what seems to me to be a rather sadly beautiful detachment, smiling wanly at the quips of my pleasure-mad companions, waiting for some sensitive Stranger to come up and press my hand and murmur: ‘I understand, I understand.’ This is a swell feeling" (April 26, 1930). The humor may tell us more about Benchley

than about Chekhov, but maybe not. Surely Benchley’s foolishness enlivens what is customarily a rather rigid form. What other drama critic would spin such a rhetorical web as this? "Things picked up a little in the theatre last week. They lay right back down again, it is true, but they did pick up at first, which is a comfort. A little picking up here and there each week, be it ever so slight, and we shall soon have our little girl downstairs again, sitting out in the sun in the garden for a few minutes every day. And then perhaps will come solid food, and something nice from Uncle Bob" (Oct. 10, 1931). The Robert Benchley a generation of readers loved and identified with wanders through a decade of New Yorker theatre reviews. He adores the drama. "It was a very exciting task to set myself, and my little face flushed with pleasurable anticipation as I dressed in my best bib (my best tucker was in the laundry) to make the rounds" (Feb. 18, 1933).

Benchley’s great strengths as a comic essayist are his unexpected openings and his brilliant one-liners. One example of an opening will suffice: "As far as this week’s drama page is concerned, you are over into the advertising right now. There need be nothing to detain you here, unless you like the monotonous hissing of plays on the pan—and not very much of that. For Spring, the Great Reaper, is here, and the pall of vernal death is slowly settling down on Broadway" (April 23, 1932). And the number and skill of his witty throwaway lines are unmeasurable. "It was one of those plays in which all the characters, unfortunately, as it turned out, enunciated very clearly" (May 23, 1931). After viewing a great acting performance in Marc Connelly’s The Green Pastures, Benchley conjectures, "If the Lord is really anything like Mr. Harrison, maybe I have been wrong all these years" (Mar. 8, 1931). One phrase is sufficient to dismiss a play forever: "I must have seen a play called ‘Dora Mobridge’ because I have the program for it right here on my desk. All right. So I saw ‘Dora Mobridge’" (May 3, 1932). He can be orotund—"But it does seem as if at our age, we might have been spared a thing like ‘Made in France.’ Our civilization can’t have incurred sufficient divine wrath to deserve that. Not only was it old, old stuff, but it was bad, bad, old, old stuff. . ." (Oct. 25, 1931). At times, wit alone is enough; a play seems adequate on its own merits, "nothing much, but all right as such shows go. Considered as the Golden Calf brought in on the Ark of the Covenant, it was a complete bust" (Nov. 29, 1931). He can encapsulate his credo in one short line: "Never give an actor a cape to wear" (July 18, 1931), or "It is too bad that people who feel strongly about good causes do not know more about writing good plays" (April 23, 1932). And Benchley is a master at reducing a weak play by quick ridicule. "But it must also be said that it contains volley after volley of some of the most immature gags ever conceived by an adult mind. [Then comes the unmistakable Benchley twist.] I take it for granted that they are the product of an adult mind. No child could have had the stamina to stay

up as late at rehearsals as must have been necessary in the fight to keep them in" (Nov. 25, 1933). Knowing that he is writing in a cliché-ridden genre, Benchley depends on his knack of creating quaint comic phrases to enliven the prose. "The rest of the cast took their parts well as my grandmother once said of Julia Marlowe. . ." (Jan. 20, 1934).

If Benchley can swiftly make a humorous point, he can also break the conventional mold of drama criticism to find room for more extended flights of comic invention. He is at his best, I think, either when the week’s plays are not worthy of discussion, when there are no new plays, or in his yearly summaries—in which he always avoids summarizing. Here is part of his 1930 "In Conclusion," where he approaches sheer nonsense in a mini-comic essay.

There is always a certain sadness incident to writing a summary of a dramatic season which is just closing. In the first place, it involves a lot of work. One has to look up the summaries which the newspaper reviewers have compiled in the preceding Sunday papers and then try to rewrite them, using different verbs and adjectives. [Awk! ES] This, in itself is cause enough for depression.

In the second place, when it comes time to make a digest of a waning season, it means that summer, with its unpleasant and depressing contacts with Nature, is at hand. And summer is, at best, the death’s head at the feast of the season, poets and travel bureaus to the contrary notwithstanding. Everything worthwhile, with the possible exception of the pores, is closed during the summer. People disappear. Lights go out. All work, aside from the renting of rowboats, ceases. And, with no work to evade, play loses its charm. There, now I’ve said it!" (June 7, 1930)

Certainly these paragraphs—which are a humorous version of a similar passage in "Rich Boy," one of the finest stories written by Benchley’s good friend F. Scott Fitzgerald—represent as fine a contribution to an anthology of American humor as any work collected in Robert Benchley’s canon of books.

Again, see his marvelous philippic against daylight saving, "that newfangled legal monster created by the Communistic Brain Trust." Benchley detests entering a theatre in sunlight, for, "No system of entertainment can flourish under the blighting influence of such Left Wing Farmer-Labor party legislation as Daylight Saving. No government can hope long to endure." And this piece appears in the Theatre column! This political travesty of conservative paranoia closes on a wonderful riff as "the Communists get an extra hour of daylight in which to overthrow the established order." Benchley promises to question "a certain Mr. Tugwell" and brings down the curtain on a superb piece of humorous writing (May 5, 1934).

Benchley also develops more traditional comic sections, which closely parallel his humor in the New Yorker and elsewhere during the 1930s. Because a week in 1931 turns up only two flawed foreign plays and some pretentious experimental theatre, Benchley falls back on sheer silliness

of style to report the drama news. The result is hilarious. "Last week was Prom Week for us play reviewers—just one round of good times and gaiety. Saturday night we saw a Greek actress doing a French play in Greek. Monday night there was Rajah Raboid with his Knights of the Orient in a mystifying program of unfortunate accidents and maladjustments. And on Tuesday night the graduating class of Miss Lea Gallienne’s School of Acting put on a show in the Gym, to which all the parents were invited." Benchley cannot miss the chance for a typical conclusion: "On Wednesday night we tried to find a Punch and Judy show to go to, but they were all closed, which was probably just as well as we were all worn out with our fun-making and ready to burst into tears if anyone pointed a finger at us" (Jan. 17, 1931). He retains a clear sense of what works best in this humor and often turns to a familiar mixture of nostalgia and whimsy. "In a book, probably to be called ‘Footlight Memories,’ you will be able to read of the good old days along Broadway in the early thirties, and you will lay the book aside with those old eyes dimmed with tears and, cracking one of your grandchildren over the head will murmur: ‘Tsk-tsk [some day I am going into a room by myself and try making that noise] those were the times when Titans strode the earth’" (July 2, 1932).

Benchley retains the stance of literary iconoclast that qualifies his excellent critical essays and parodies. His negative remarks show a special drive, a rhythm: "Whipping myself along with a youthful prejudice against the sisters of Haworth Parsonage, I have succeeded in maintaining a dogged and sullen indifference to their many biographers, in the face of what has turned out to be a world movement to Know More About the Brontë’s . . . I happen to have been more interested in Emily Dickinson’s family life, that’s all. (I do suppose that I might possibly have been able to swing both during my half-century of research.)" (April 14, 1934) His attack on autograph hounds is an inspired venture into absurd invective. "Nobody knows where they spring from, or what they do in the daytime, for they look and behave like no one you have ever seen before. They are small, and dark, and fairly loathsome, like mature pygmies" (April 21, 1934). Tolerance for the absurd assists Benchley in surviving illogical structure and stupid plotting in the plays he must watch. Deploring a wretched Civil War melodrama, Benchley strikes out on his own comic path. "Would a man in his position actually let himself be arrested as a Confederate spy when he had such important documents [and here Benchley departs] pertaining to the Suez Canal?" Why the Suez Canal? Because Robert Benchley wants it. "An interesting story," he continues in this review of a play treating America in 1864, in, really, his own comic attempt to provide interest, "is told of the Suez

Canal. It seems that this fellow Disraeli (George Arless) was on the inside of the whole Canal project—in a nice way, you know. Sidney Smith said some funny things, too, in his day . . ." (June 9, 1934). Pity the unfortunate dramatist who wondered when his play would actually be discussed by American humor’s master of the irrelevant, digressive ramble.

Benchley’s special form of mild paranoia directs him to create tiny comic fictions within his reviews. When he is negative about a show based on the life of the gambler Arnold Rothstein, the reviewer imagines dark strangers following him, which "sent me ambling back into the theatre, remarking, in a tone loud enough for them to hear, that it certainly was a great show. I am now using all my influence with the editors of the New Yorker to print a limited edition of this particular issue. . ." (May 3, 1930).

From such playing with fictional devices, it is only a short step to Robert Benchley’s favorite form of fiction—parody. From Sherwood Anderson to Marcel Proust, from Charles Dickens to Henry Adams, from H. G. Wells and Theodore Dreiser to John Galsworthy and Thornton Wilder, the excesses of novelists provided Benchley with some of the best material to be exploited for his particular parodic gifts. Equally, the plays he must review are often best discussed through the medium of parodic take-offs. On one occasion, interestingly, the New Yorker opens with Benchley’s "New Plays for Old," a first-rate parody of Chinese drama, "out of the Golden Age of Chinese Drama (80,000—76,000 B. C.," which serves as a reference point a few pages later in his Theatre column that questions if audiences deserve to be bored by the lengthy plays of George Bernard Shaw or Mei-Lan-fang. Benchley makes no distinction between the genuine offering on the New York stage and the one invented by the humorist in the magazine’s columns. On a dull week, Benchley writes a parody of the theatre critic’s dream, to be in Europe, "writing back trenchant criticism of the foreign drama and studying types. It is Doppel-Bräu Week in Munich and people are flocking from all over the land to get a load of fresh, newly made headaches. In Paris (dear Paris) the potato chips are just beginning to poke their little heads up in the Rue Caubon and all the world is young again. What drama criticism I could be sending back from Europe." "Could be" sets a challenge that this writer cannot resist; there follows a report on Edgar Wallace’s Auf den Flesch, which treats gangster life in Chicago’s "Underwelt" (Feb. 14, 1931). And if the British drama critic St. John Irvine can use his Theatre column in the Observer to describe a trip to Scandinavia, Robert Benchley is up to parodying even a drama review—he describes carefully his trip to New Bedford, by boat (July 4, 1931).

Although kindliness is Benchley’s trademark, even the genial lover of acting and playwriting succumbs to the temptations of irony, sometimes heavy irony. (Yet not as heavy as Dorothy Parker’s, who when filling-in for the Hollywood-bound Benchley, keeps the faith by describing A. A.

Milne’s drama The House Beautiful as "The Play Lousy"). When Robert Benchley feels that the public is being diddled—to say nothing of the weary reviewer—he can employ strong satire. In an Ed Wynn vehicle, "You will discover," Benchley warns, "without much searching, a Mother Goose story of such banality as to affront even the children for whom it was written, and a series of the highest-pensioned gags in the G. A. R. Just the manual labor of chopping them from old funny papers must have been stupendous" (Mar. 1, 1930). He can be direct yet retain his penchant for whimsicality. "There’s a lineup for you! There’s a lineup for a firing squad. If spring is determined, year after year, to push these little things through the ground along with her shoots of grass and crocuses, then by all means let us do without the grass and crocuses and leap right from winter into mid-summer. At least then the new shows will have music in them" (May 3, 1930).

Most often, Benchley develops little side-references to make his ironic message clear. Here he condemns amateurish acting by referring to one of his favorite themes, the not-so-cute child, thus joining two forms of immaturity. "The one-act plays which I was able to sit through last week seemed to be a little better done than those of last year, but this is like saying ‘Little Roger is coming along better in this schoolwork. He holds his book right side up now.’ That wouldn’t mean that I would recommend going to hear Roger give a reading in the Town Hall" (May 17, 1930). The audience doesn’t escape Benchley’s ironic notice, especially those he calls unsophisticated mothers who have led sheltered lives and who laugh too hard at simplistic comedy. "It must have been a big night for them," he muses, "what with seeing the trolley cars and electric signs, and all the automobiles in the streets, to say nothing of the play itself. In fact to say nothing of the play itself would be much the easiest way out" (May 30, 1931). It is manifest that he reserves his most severe ironic anger for weaknesses in comedy, as if Benchley feels most pain at flaws in the basic craft of humor that he practices well himself. His irony then is clear and cutting. To a wretched comedy he gives no mercy; the play "might have been translated from the French, or the Hungarian, or from both at once. I could detect not one item in its composition that even savored of originality" (April 21, 1934). When American dramatic humor is threatened, Benchley springs to the defense of what he cares deeply about by attacking those who misuse the form. His attacks show little restraint—and, after all, he knows what he is doing: "I use the word ‘stupendously’ after careful conference with our Restraint Editor . . ," (Dec. 2, 1933).

As that line makes clear, Robert Benchley is intensely self-conscious throughout his humorous writing, and his Theatre work shows this reflexiveness. Like many humorists whose gambit is to laugh at themselves, Benchley is a constant critic of his own work. When he grants faint praise, he watches himself doing it. Thus, on A Month in the Country, "It was

a long evening, and not a very exciting one, but it certainly was not boring—at least not to this section of the theatre-going public, whose boring-point is 96°F" (Mar. 29, 1930). After a disquisition on matters of some substance—Helen Hayes’s demand for fifty-word-only reviews, difficulties in purchasing theatre tickets—Benchley self-consciously undercuts his editorializing: "Next week we will take up the subject of Stage Censorship about which we know nothing also" (Dec. 27, 1930). Of course, he often falls into the word-play temptation, a technique that calls attention to the humorist who seemingly apologizes for his verbal tricks while in the act of playing them: "It is on us play-reviewers that the brunt of such a retrenchment policy falls. We are black and blue from falling brunts" (June 27, 1931).

Reflexiveness can lead to theorizing. And despite the myth, one certainly promulgated strongly by Benchley himself, that he holds no critical credos, that he is merely a funny man, that he is but the public’s surrogate, he holds, like any genuine humorist, well-defined standards of professionalism in acting and craftsmanship in playwriting. While he may not articulate them directly, he does so obliquely, though his humorous throw-away lines, which, if brought together in one essay, would provide Robert Benchley’s Poetics of the Theatre.

Early on, Benchley denies that his close relationships with Parker, George Kaufman, Adams, Edna Ferber et al. can define his approach to drama reviewing. He responds to a writer who is prejudiced against "that mythical group of demons known as ‘the critics at the Algonquin.’ In the first place, he cannot keep up with the menace market or he would know that the Algonquin coterie has been practically eliminated as a sinister influence on the arts, thanks chiefly to the fact that it never existed" (Mar. 1, 1930). Thus, he belongs to no critical school. That Benchley refused to state critical rules largely stems from his belief in the (indefinable) magic of the theatre. In a wistful reminiscence largely undiluted by comic effects, he recalls himself as a little boy putting on a play in his attic and being disappointed that the audience didn’t grasp his transformation from beggar to prince since he had thought hard about the change. "It was my first big disillusion on the matter of magic, and I have never dared write another play since" (April 26, 1930). If he can’t create the magic himself, he can certainly recognize the gift in others —a gift that excessive analysis would make stale. Playwriting’s loss is reviewing’s gain, and Robert Benchley is always more an admirer of magic than a carper at flaws.

To discover Benchley’s standards for plays and actors, one only has to read carefully through the humor and seek the firm bases. For example, after mocking Ibsen’s The Vikings as a "punk play," Benchley disingenuously pretends to laugh off his obvious respect for the dramatist: "I am one of the best friends that Ibsen ever had and the Ibsen estate recognizes this and sends me a hundred cigarettes each year on my birth-

day" (May 24, 1930). For all the familiar self-mockery that surrounds his assessment of George M. Cohan as comic actor now and ten years earlier, the admiration shines through. "(I must stop using that phrase ‘ten years ago.’ It depresses me.) I was a novitiate then, and easily excited. Would I be moved to jump up and down as I did in 1920 and hail Mr. Cohan as the greatest man in the world since Martin Luther?" (May 31, 1930).

Pretentious theatre journals attract Benchley’s contempt as "those magazines with uncut pages and dull-finish halftones showing four parallelograms in various stages of disarray with captions such as: ‘Act VIII, Scene 4, of the Kalpfleisch production of "Charlie’s Aunt," Luftspielhaus’" (June 28, 1930). Faintly humorous but fiercely direct, Robert Benchley’s most forthright critical statement denies the usefulness for himself of any abstract rules: "I have never been able to analyze whatever it is that makes some plays sound like manuscripts and others like life. It isn’t in the words or dialogue itself, but I have thought of that point and checked up." He is straightforwardly pragmatic in the great American humorist tradition of Huck Finn and Simon Suggs: if it works, leave it alone. Robert Benchley could play the critic’s game, but his own sense of humor keeps him in the reviewer’s camp. "Every once in a while this department wakes up in a cold sweat thinking of how little it really gives its readers in the matter of cultural dialectics. No stimulating discussions on the Theory of Acting ever seem to come from the opinions printed on this page, and Sir Henry Irving or the team of Beaumont and Fletcher might as well have been civil engineers for all the attention they ever get under our all-too-parochial heading, ‘The Theatre.’" Well, perhaps. But Benchley then mocks himself a bit too harshly, and the reader knows that the reviewer doesn’t mean to put himself too far down on the scale of criticism. Benchley remarks that in London papers "the words ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ are as common in their pages as ‘swell’ and ‘punko’ are in these" (July 9, 1932). He has his standards, all right, but he can be humorous and indirect in setting them forth. Benchley admires good, thoughtful left-wing drama, as he makes clear in many positive reviews. That he dislikes propaganda in its cruder forms, he also makes clear—to the readers who have the humor to draw the idea from the wisecrack. "Why," Benchley asks as if grimacing in pain, "can’t someone write a propaganda play about the St. Lawrence Waterways Project, just for once?" (Mar. 3, 1934). Funny, sure. A critically valid attack on political oversimplifications, too, sure.

Since D. H. Lawrence wisely warns us to trust the tale, not the teller, we should not take to heart Benchley’s typically overmodest advice about his New Yorker work. "This, then, concludes our analysis of the middle

week of May, 1930. You may destroy your notes, as you will have no need for them again" (May 24, 1930). I very much doubt it. We should preserve some of the very best American humorous writing of our century that Robert Benchley has left buried in the Wayward Press and Theatre columns to be found now only in dusty library stacks or sticky microfilm drawers. He was a humorist for all seasons, theatrical and journalistic, and his critical writing is as valuable as his creative achievement.

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