What Was Robert Benchley?

Laughter’s Gentle Soul: The Life of Robert Benchley, by Billy Altman (Norton, 382 pp., $30)

HOW refreshing to read a biography of a humorist who was not, in real life, a son of a bitch. The worst that could be said of Robert Benchley (1889-1945) was that he was a bit of a bounder to his wife, an absentee father to his sons, and ultimately a disappointment to himself. But for all that, his wife and sons were devoted to him, as he in his way was to them. His friends, who were legion, adored him. As he lay in the hospital, hemorrhaging to death from cirrhosis, forty people showed up to volunteer to give blood. How many writers could make that posthumous boast? At one of the many wakes held in his honor, the novelist John O’Hara said, “This time, the party is really over.” Someone rejoined that the deceased members of the Algonquin Round Table must be partying all night in Heaven. James Thurber, whose most famous creation, Walter Mitty, had been based on Benchley’s bumbling short-film persona, Joe Doakes, said yes, and they were no doubt “having the time of their infinities.”

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Christopher Buckley

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Laughter’s Gentle Soul: The Life of Robert Benchley, by Billy Altman (Norton, 382 pp., $30)

HOW refreshing to read a biography of a humorist who was not, in real life, a son of a bitch. The worst that could be said of Robert Benchley (1889-1945) was that he was a bit of a bounder to his wife, an absentee father to his sons, and ultimately a disappointment to himself. But for all that, his wife and sons were devoted to him, as he in his way was to them. His friends, who were legion, adored him. As he lay in the hospital, hemorrhaging to death from cirrhosis, forty people showed up to volunteer to give blood. How many writers could make that posthumous boast? At one of the many wakes held in his honor, the novelist John O’Hara said, “This time, the party is really over.” Someone rejoined that the deceased members of the Algonquin Round Table must be partying all night in Heaven. James Thurber, whose most famous creation, Walter Mitty, had been based on Benchley’s bumbling short-film persona, Joe Doakes, said yes, and they were no doubt “having the time of their infinities.”