Profile: Robert Benchley (with some Hodgman for good measure)

I have a quotes widget on my Google homepage, and the other day I was greeted by this as I logged on:

Defining and analyzing humor is a pastime of humorless people.

Friend of Dorothy Parker, writer of things for and The New Yorker and Vanity Fair (he filled in occasionally reviewing theatre for our friend Wodehouse), wearer of pencil-thin mustache, minor movie star, and grandfather of the Jaws novelist Peter Benchley, Robert Benchley apparently thinks I'm a bore (pshaw, as if he wouldn't have had this exact same blog if he'd had the means). Anyway, I'll assume he wasn't trying to pick a fight through time with me and chalk it up to the Algonquin Hotel crowd's need to incessantly turn clever phrases.

The quote did pique my curiosity about this fellow I'd never heard of, so I did a little research on Robert Bentley. The more I learned about him, the more Benchley struck me as a kind of proto-John Hodgman. He started as a writer from the upper-right hand corner of the country in New Hampshire (Hodgman, Massachusetts), worked for the Harvard Lampoon (Hodgman, McSweeney's/The Believer) and hung out with other interesting writers like George S. Kaufman and the aforementioned Parker (Hodgman, Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket and Amy Sedaris). Benchley then worked his way into Hollywood with various writing treatments and minor starring roles in, among other things, a series of satirical short "How To" films. Hodgman, of course, can been seen in Mac commercials, that "Bowie" episode of "Flight of the Conchords," and "Baby Mama."

Below is Benchley's explanation for why the United States found itself in the midst of the Depression. (Though maybe at that point it was simply "a depression," as the proper-nouning of things tends to happen after everything is concluded.) As the feeble-minded economist, Benchley is very "PC" and not very "Mac," don't you agree?



Some transcribed highlights, for those of you who don't like to watch old black-and-white footage. (What is it with you guys, anyway? Where does this fear come from?):

Now what were the primary causes of the "depression," as we call it? Overproduction, maladjustments in gold distribution, overproduction, deflation, too little thyroid secretion (or Platt's disease), too much vermouth, overproduction, and, by the same token, underproduction. Then, too, there was the Gulf Stream. All of these helped lead to inflation, deflation, and overproduction, with a consequent depression.

It brings to mind Hodgman's turns as Resident Expert on "The Daily Show." Here he is on our current recession:



They even use props in the same way. Hodgman's dead canary in the old-timey stock-ticker = Benchley's ambiguous graph. Eerie! Too bad about the sands of time, etc., I bet Hodgman would have fit in perfectly around that Algonquin table.