Robert Benchley
Robert Benchley
Robert Charles Benchleywas an American humorist best known for his work as a newspaper columnist and film actor. From his beginnings at the Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University, through his many years writing essays and articles for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and his acclaimed short films, Benchley's style of humor brought him respect and success during his life, from New York City and his peers at the Algonquin Round Table to contemporaries in the burgeoning film industry...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth15 September 1889
CityWorcester, MA
CountryUnited States of America
There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes and those who do not.
There are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide everything into two and those who don't
A great many people have come up to me and asked me how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated. My answer is 'Don't you wish you knew?
New York - The city where the people from Oshkosh look at the people from Dubuque in the next theater seats and say "These New Yorkers don't dress any better than we do.
We are constantly being surprised that people did things well before we were born.
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.
Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with that it's compounding a felony.
The knocking out of a pipe can be made almost as important as the smoking of it, especially if there are nervous people in the room. A good, smart knock of a pipe against a tin wastebasket and you will have a neurasthenic out of his chair and into the window sash in no time.
I can get dressed earlier in the evening with every intention of going to a dance at midnight, but somehow after the theatre the thing to do seems to be either to go to bed or sit around somewhere. It doesn't seem possible that somewhere people can be expecting you at an hour like that.
People who begin sentences with "I may be old-fashioned but--" are usually not only old-fashioned but wrong. I never thought the time would come when I should catch myself leading off with that crack. But I feel it coming on right now.
What is to be done with people who can't read a Sunday paper without messing it all up?... 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.
The art of cursing people seems to have lost its tang since the old days when a good malediction took four deep breaths to deliverand sent the outfielders scurrying toward the fence to field.
The Great Arizona Desert is full of the bleaching bones of people who waited for me to start something.
There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them.