[Yates is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt from his The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century, he characterizes Benchley's comic narrator as an ordinary man beset by the forces of nature. In addition, Yates examines Benchley's work as a literary critic.]

It is impossible to say just when the bemused householder and white-collar man became really prominent in American humor, but by 1910 Stephen Leacock, Simeon Strunsky, and Clarence Day, Jr. were writing pieces in which the disguise of each author was just that. As noted before, one of Benchley's direct models was Leacock, whose Literary Lapses appeared in that year. "Leacock [to quote Ralph L. Curry] found much of his fun in the little man beset by advertising, fads, convention, sex, science, cussedness, machinery—social and industrial—and many other impersonal tyrannies." Benchley's favorite piece of humor was "My Financial Career," in Literary Lapses, where a bedeviled Little Man of the lower middle class is overawed and confused by a bank and its officials. Robert once stated, "I have enjoyed Leacock's work so much that I have written everything he ever wrote—anywhere from one to five years after him." Leacock wrote of the Little Man in an urbane prose that owed much to the familiar essays of Addison and Lamb, to the English tradition of parody as found in Punch (one of whose columnists, A. A. Milne, was another favorite of Benchley), to nonsense humor as exemplified in the verse of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, and to the newspaper columnists on Leacock's own side of the Atlantic. In its liveliness, it resembled most perhaps the last-named kind of writing. Despite Benchley's statements of his indebtedness, he might conceivably have written much as he did had he never read Leacock, but his work included all of the elements that went into Leacock's humor. The nonsense element, expressed by such bits as the line from Leacock's Nonsense Novels, "Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions," was to recur with special effectiveness in Benchley's writing.…

In stressing the irrational side of [such American humorists as] Benchley, Thurber, and Perelman, Walter Blair calls them "Crazy Men" and says that "Benchley constantly assumes the role of 'Perfect Neurotic.'" Blair cites My Ten Years in a Quandary, in which the main character "cannot leave a party at a decent time, cure hiccoughs, wear a white suit, smoke a cigarette, or read while eating…"A worrier over trifles, this man with his "persecution complex" and his fear of dementia praecox is "just a mess of frustrations and phobias." All of this is true, and one can add to Blair's examples indefinitely.

In Of All Things!, the Little Man as a suburbanite is stalled by the furnace, stumped by auction bridge, and strapped by household expenses; as a family man he is badgered by children and relatives. His middle-class status augments his frustration: "… when I am confronted, in the flesh, by the 'close up' of a workingman with any vestige of authority, however small, I immediately lose my perspective—and also my poise." Out-of-doors, he is thwarted by "Old Step-Mother Nature" as much as was Mr. Dooley or the persona of Day in After All: when he tries to garden he will allow that nature is wonderful only if something he has planted grows—and that is unlikely.

In recounting the collapse of his efforts to learn to drive a car, this Little Man says, "Frankly I am not much of a hand at machinery of any sort … the pencil sharpener in our office is about as far as I, personally, have ever got in the line of operating a complicated piece of mechanism with any degree of success." In No Poems, he admits that even such simple articles as bedroom slippers conspire against him, as do also "the hundred and one little bits of wood and metal that go to make up the impedimenta of our daily life—the shoes and pins, the picture books and door keys, the bits of fluff and sheets of newspaper." Nature, technology, people—all give him a hard time.

But he is not really licked, though he says he is. Nor is he "crazy," in the sense of having fostered an image of himself and a picture of the world that are out of touch with reality. He has moments of aberration—as who does not? Benchley's narrator is the normal man, with the ordinary degree of neurosis slightly exaggerated. Except during these brief moments, this character is acutely conscious that his images of self and of the world have lost contact with realities, and the loss worries him. He is usually quite aware that there are realities other than his images, and at moments his illusions vanish and he sees truth with painful clarity. Between these moments, his frequent if vague awareness that a difference exists between his actual self and the self-image that he wishes were valid (but knows is not) produces a continual flow of comic irony.

In an ethical sense, he is never seriously aberrant. Benchley's Little Man has an integrity that can be strained but never quite broken; it gleams sullenly through his foggiest notions. In The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, Karen Homey says that one refuge of the intellectual sort of neurotic is a detachment in which he refuses to take anything seriously, including himself. The self-mockery of Benchley's fictive double is never carried to the point where he loses his wholesome awareness that man's environment was made for man, not he for it, and if things don't seem that way (here the reformer speaks)—well, things had better be changed. Miss Homey also states that the neurotic feels a compulsion to be liked. Benchley's double is less concerned with being liked than with preserving his integrity and his ethical vision.

Applied to nature this statement is certainly fatuous, and the Little Man looks littlest—he is most consistently rebuffed and humiliated—in his conflicts with the nonhuman environment. Benchley's friend and fellow-humorist Frank Sullivan once said (in referring to Robert himself rather than to the Benchley persona), that nature "had him stopped cold." Benchley felt heckled by pigeons, and once he was attacked by terns on the beach at Nantucket. But his Little Man, though afraid of thunder, could at least take the stand that "Nature can go her way and I'll go mine." Thus, loosely speaking, Benchley is "naturalistic" in the same sense as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway. To these writers, man was all but helpless in the grip of vast nonhuman forces and was lucky if these forces seemed merely indifferent, as in Crane's "The Open Boat," rather than malignant. But far from yielding to nature more than he had to, man still must live as man. This unsentimental view of man's relation to nature is the source of the irony in Benchley's numerous parodies of the "Hail, vernal equinox!" school of nature writing.

In a sense, Benchley's view of man's relationship to nature was more pessimistic than the Darwinian attitude that nature is a ruthless struggle for the survival of the fittest. Such a view implies order and purpose in nature, however irrelevant to man's desires, a view that Benchley did not hold. He is more like Will Cuppy in distrusting both the "hearts-and-flowers" and the "tooth-and-claw" approach. To both humorists, nature is purposeless and chaotic as is much of man's "civilization."

Behind some of Benchley's parodies of nature writing lies an attack on both the sentimental and the scientific, or at least the Darwinian, approaches to nature. Examples of this attack may be seen in the futility of "The Social Life of the Newt" and in the remarks on eggs in The Early Worm, where the utter purposelessness of the shape of the egg is pointed out:

If you will look at these eggs, you will see that each one is Almost round, but not Quite. They are more of an "egg-shape." This may strike you as odd at first, until you learn that this is Nature's way of distinguishing eggs from large golf balls. You see, Mother Nature takes no chances. She used to, but she learned her lesson. And that is a lesson that all of you must learn as well.

It was not that Benchley actively disbelieved in evolution but that he had not (like fellow-Yankee Robert Frost) himself worked up "that metaphor" and was not much interested in it—except as material for parody. His narrator cannot defeat nature but can at least laugh at it even as he laughs at his own losing struggle with natural phenomena.

If Benchley's man can do little about nature he can occasionally make headway against certain man-made phenomena—for instance, letters. One of Benchley's more revealing pieces is "Mind's Eye Trouble," in No Poems. Here Benchley (wearing his mask) confesses with ostentatious humility that, "I seem to have been endowed at birth by a Bad, Bad Fairy with a paucity of visual imagination which amounts practically to a squint." This limitation causes him to picture the events in any book he reads as taking place in the home town of his youth. Victor Hugo may not have had Yankee-land in mind when he wrote Les Miserables; "However, regardless of what Hugo had in mind, I have Front Street, Worcester in mind when I read it." All scenes from classical Roman life are vivified for this reader only in the driveway of the House at May and Woodland Streets where lived the girl he courted, and the mob of Romans listening to Antony's famous speech "extended 'way over across the street to the front lawn of the Congregational Church parsonage." Similarly, the characters of Charles Dickens "all made their exits and their entrances by the door at the left of the stairway and delivered all their speeches in front of the fireplace in the 'sitting-room' of this house at No. 3 Shepard Street." The yard on one side is fixed in this Little Man's mind as the Solid South and as the place where "Werther wrestled with his sorrows." In "this stunted imagination of mine," the yard of his Aunt Mary Elizabeth is the West, "and the West had better accommodate itself to my whim." Scenes from the works of Byron, Samuel Richardson, Mark Twain, Katherine Mansfield, Frank Swinnerton, and Hugh Walpole are inevitably re-created in the playground of the Woodland Street School or its vicinity. The narrator even finds himself "sending Proust walking up and down Woodland Street with Albertine."

The "confession" of this well-read wise fool is the literary equivalent of Mr. Dooley's testing the validity of political ideas by showing how they would operate in Archey Road. Benchley is implying that if certain overrated works of literature do not retain their reality and power when their characters and events are imagined within the frame of the normal, modern man's everyday experience, it is these works that are at fault, not the man. Uncritical readers may worship this stuff without putting it to the test, but not Benchley's narrator.

According to Nathaniel Benchley, his father had burrowed through Dr. Eliot's "Harvard Classics" and "concluded that it hadn't been worth the effort." Robert's own comment was, "If one adopts the Missourian attitude in reading the masters, and, laying aside their reputation, puts the burden of proof on them, many times they are not so impressive." The views of Robert are similar to those reflected by his narrator in "Mind's Eye Trouble"; Benchley's mask in that piece distorts his true self only by exaggeration. The confession is no mea culpa but an affirmation of Benchley's faith in his own tastes as an educated but not academic reader.

Benchley's attitude toward Shakespeare too is that of the cultivated fellow who reads or goes to a play for pleasure and not to worship the highbrowed god of scholarship. Benchley scoffs at Shakespeare revivals and insists that on the stage Shakespeare brings out the worst in actors (he excepts certain specific productions from this criticism, including most of the efforts of Maurice Evans and Orson Welles). He is particularly severe with Shakespeare's humor, condemning his low comedy as "horsy and crass" and claiming that, "It is impossible for a good actor, as we know good actors today, to handle a Shakespearean low comedy part, for it demands mugging and tricks which no good actor would permit himself to do." If alive today, the Bard would write slapstick movie scripts for Mack Sennett. In "Shakespeare Explained," Benchley parodies the dissection of Shakespeare by pedants in editions overburdened with footnotes. The way to enjoy Shakespeare, he suggests elsewhere, is to read snatches from his plays now and then when you want to, and stop reading when you want to. This attitude will at least be one's own, not borrowed from some teacher.

Benchley spoke for a more literate type of man than did Ade, Dooley, or Lardner, but his point of view toward letters was scarcely less middlebrow, especially when he dealt with contemporary authors. Like Marquis and Lardner, he parodied many of them, although in Benchley's case parody did not necessarily imply a dislike of the writer thus treated. For instance, he satirized Sinclair Lewis' "flair for minutiae" but elsewhere praised "the remarkable accuracy with which he reports details in his 'Main Street.'" Other moderns whom he parodied included Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Mencken and Nathan, James Branch Cabell, and Marcel Proust. Benchley had no patience with flamboyant, arty, or grotesque styles. He said of William Faulkner, "A writer who doesn't make his book understandable to a moderately intelligent reader is not writing that way because he is consciously adapting a diffuse style, but because he simply doesn't know how to write." Not caring whether he was accused of lack of imagination or not, Benchley insisted on testing all literature, both classic and modern, by trying to fit it into his familiar frame of reference, and by setting it against the standards of his persona. In spite of the Little Man's absurdities, Benchley felt that this man was the only possible measure of things. The "great" writers did not "live" in the notes of a few scholars but must overcome a perfectly natural resistance to the new, archaic, or unfamiliar by a substantial body of practiced but nonprofessional readers-for-pleasure.

At various times, Benchley ran the theater department in three publications: the Bookman, Life, and the New Yorker. As a drama critic, he let others speak for show business or the intellectuals while he consciously tried to represent the man who goes to plays for pleasure (not necessarily amusement). Benchley's comments on Bemard Shaw's The Apple Cart and on some Chinese pantomimes amount to a theater-goer's credo. To the argument that we shouldn't be bored by traditions of theater not our own but should make allowances for them, Benchley replied, "Why need we be bored? Why should we have to make allowances for anything when we go for entertainment? Why is it incumbent on the audience which has paid its money for an evening in the theatre to adjust itself to Shaw or to Mei Lanfang? Other playwrights and other actors have to adjust themselves to their audiences if they want to hold their attention.… My suggestion would be that nobody be allowed to bore us."

The limitations of this view were surely those of most audiences. One might argue that every tradition was new to its public once and that Benchley's attitude would stultify the attempts of any experimental playwright to reach an audience beyond the narrow circle of professional theater folk and arty bohemians. One might further protest that the sort of playgoer who takes the trouble to read drama reviews usually does not just pay his money for an evening at any play; he at least knows that G. B. Shaw and George M. Cohan purvey different kinds of fare, whatever he may think of either, and he is at liberty to neglect whichever kind he fears will bore him. However, in his practice as reviewer, Benchley was less strict than in his general pronouncements. He praised many specimens of every kind of play, from musicals by Cohan and comedies by Noel Coward to Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot, though his chief criterion was always whether the piece in question stimulated and held the interest of the audience. Through this criterion, Benchley as drama critic kept Benchley the moralist sternly in check, and when he praised the sociological dramas of the nineteen-thirties, including the "message" plays by Paul Green, Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Rice, and Clifford Odets, and the documentary offerings by the Federal Theater Project, he praised them as effective plays, not as trumpet-calls to reformers. To bad plays he was merciless, whether they were musical fluff, or documentaries about the plight of sharecroppers in the South or Jews under Hitler. He sympathized warmly with the liberal purposes of such documentaries, but they were not necessarily theater.

Besides demanding entertainment, Benchley often applied the frame-of-reference test as a dramatic standard. He did much to boost the reputation of Eugene O'Neill, but he criticized the exaggerated picture of misery and crAbbédness in Desire Under the Elms, and parodied—though he frankly enjoyed—the melodramatic aspects of Mourning Becomes Electra. In reviewing Marco Millions for the Bookman, he criticized the author on the ground that

during his poetic passages designed to set off the idealism and aesthetic superiority of the East over the fierce commercialism and blindness of the West there still runs the debatable thesis that money and numbers and luxury are in themselves ignoble things and that, if a man prefers the sensuous charms of good food, a buxom wife and bags of gold to speculating on Truth and the Idea and consorting with a lyric and love-sick princess, he is in a way a bounder and fit only to be crushed on the wheel.

Here the Little Man as Broadway playgoer was resisting values that did not meet the test of his experience. In view of Benchley's refusal to meet the artier arts halfway, it is not surprising that he cared almost as little for grand opera as did Ade and Lardner and followed their example by largely ignoring it except in parody.

Norris W. Yates, "Robert Benchley's Normal Bumbler," in his The American Humorist: Conscience of the Twentieth Century, Iowa State University Press, 1964, pp. 241-61.