[Blair was an educator, editor, and critic who is recognized as one of the first American scholars to appraise humor academically. In the following excerpt from his Horse Sense in American Humor, he distinguishes Benchley as one of the most popular humorists of his day, and suggests that the uniqueness of his sketches derives from the neurotic nature of his protagonists. ]

Mr. Robert Benchley tells of the trouble he had when, like Ward, he became worried about grammar and the sound of words. It all started when he tried to figure out the present tense of the verb of which "wrought" is the past participle:

I started out with a rush. "I wright," I fairly screamed. Then, a little lower: "I wrught." Then, very low: "I wrouft." Then silence.

From that day until now I have been murmuring to myself: "I wrught—I wraft—I wronjst. You wruft—he wragst—we wrinjsen.…"

People hear me murmuring and ask me what I am saying.

"I wrujhst," is all that I can say in reply.

"I know," they say, "but what were you saying just now?"

"I wringst."

This gets me nowhere.

It is easy to see why this writer claims that "One of the easiest methods of acquiring insanity is word-examining. Just examine a word you have written, and then call up Dr. Jessup and tell him to come and get you. Tell him to wear just what he has on."

Mr. Benchley—in his role as a humorist, at any rate—has the same sort of random associations Ward had when he was on the platform in the sixties. Riding on a train, he sights a dust storm, which calls to his mind the fact that "a dust-storm … is a lot like life. It has its entrances and its exits, and it is the strongest team that wins. And by 'the strongest team' I do not mean the team with the most muscle, or sinew, or brawn. I mean the strongest team." Weirdly his mind maunders on, from the strongest team, to the lives of people in shacks, to mountain trout, to old miners and what they might have thought, to what trout have thought, then to Indians and what "they think when they see sand-storms and mountain trout."

Again … this fellow is faced with the job of getting up before an audience and making a speech. Hear him galumphing around:

Now in connection with reading this report, there are one or two points which Dr. Murnie wanted brought up in connection with it, and he has asked me to bring them up in connec—to bring them up.

In the first place, there is the question of the work which we are trying to do up at our little place at Silver Lake, a work which we feel not only fills a very definite need in the community but also fills a very definite need—er—in the community. I don't think that many of the members of the Society realize just how big the work is that we are trying to do up there. For instance, I don't think that it is generally known that most of our boys are between the age of fourteen. We feel that, by taking the boy at this age, we can get closer to his real nature—for a boy has a very real nature, you may be sure—and bring him into closer touch not only with the school, the parents, and with each other, but also with the town in which they live, the country to whose flag they pay allegiance, and to the—ah—(trailing off) town in which they live.

Here there is both the snakelike fascination of rhythms and phrases that worried Ward and the jittery uncertainty that scrambled the phrases of Adeler. A humorist at work today, in other words, is nicely carrying on with one of the good old devices of American humor.

Mr. Robert Benchley is one of the most popular men in the business of being funny today [1942]. He has syndicated his skits, at various times, to a large number of newspapers; his books have sold well above 120,000 copies; he has done well on the stage, on the screen, and on the radio.

Son of a New England family and graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Mr. Benchley began to show a knack for humor when he was an undergraduate at Harvard. There he made college mates laugh by giving a burlesque lecture which had qualities closely akin to those of his later comic writings—one which, by the way, used many tricks like those which had been used by Artemus Ward, when that old-timer had given his burlesque lecture in London. Young Benchley's talk was on the woolen-mitten industry, and he used a napkin for a screen and an umbrella for a pointer. Part of it went like this:

Our first slide shows that in 1904, it took 1487 man hours to produce 1905, which, in turn, required 3586 man hours to hold its own. This made 3,000,000 foot-pounds of energy, a foot-pound being the number of feet in a pound. This is, of course, all per capita.… Next slide, please!.… I'm afraid my assistant has it upside down.… There! that's better!

Inevitably, some years after graduation, the man who had made such an analysis of industry as this, having found that the world of business was not for him, turned to humor.

The pages of the books he wrote, as has been suggested, often remind one of the humor of his forerunners. Many times he shapes his paragraphs and sentences as they did: instinctively, probably, he hits on tried and true ways of making people laugh. But there is a difference between his writings and the older ones.…

This difference is suggested by a look at the kind of a character who woefully makes his way through the strange happenings set down in Mr. Benchley's writings. Any of the books shows the chief thing about this poor devil—that his whole life is a series of humiliations and frustrations. He is constantly bedeviled by all sorts of petty little things which a masterful man would easily be able to take in his stride. As a critic of this writer, Mr. Bryant, says,

.… he sees himself.… not the master of high comedy, but the victim of low tragedy. King Lear loses a throne; Benchley loses a filling. Romeo breaks his heart; Benchley breaks his shoelace. They are annihilated; he is humiliated. And to his humiliations there is no end. His whole life has been spent as the dupe of "the total depravity of inanimate things." Today a knicknack leaps from his hand and shatters to the floor. Tonight his slippers will crawl away and wheel around backward. …

Happier men could laugh little troubles like these off—but they happen so often to the fellow who appears in the Benchley pieces that he develops a persecution complex about them.

A book of his, aptly called My Ten Years in a Quandary, shows this character sloshing around in a sea of troubles. Furious, eager to take arms—as Shakespeare puts it—against the waves, he finds himself unable to do anything. All the time he is bothered by frustrations—in general and in particular. He cannot leave a party at a decent time, cure hiccoughs, wear a white suit, smoke a cigarette, or read while eating—though he wants passionately to do all these things. Pathetically, this victim of suppressions looks forward to a total eclipse, when darkness will give him "a chance," as he says, "to do a lot of things I have planned to do, but have been held back from." And what are these daring deeds to be? Simply these—he will put on a white suit, pick some flowers, waltz, exercise on a rowing machine, read some books, and make some faces. All these innocent little diversions he has been afraid to enjoy in the bright light of day.

Plainly, the difference between this victim of fate and healthier men is that the healthier men would not want to do such things or—if they did—would do them. But the man in a Benchley sketch, paralyzed by these tremendous frustrations, worries and worries about them. A chronic worrier, he is tormented by other things besides those which have been mentioned—fur-bearing trout, a bird which breaks down his morale, a ghost which worries him into spending a whole night in the Grand Central Station, meteorites, a Scottie (to which he feels inferior), the Younger Generation (which he fears is hatching a sinister plot), and dancing prairie chickens.

Read on in the book and you will find that even more serious troubles pester him. When this poor creature lies down to sleep, his throat closes up and he stops breathing. He has dementia praecox and a phobia for barber chairs, and he goes crazy in a lonely shack on the seashore. All these psychopathic woes are made known in one volume. Read the rest of his volumes, and it will be clear that the man—if his books are to be believed—is just a mess of frustrations and phobias. As Mr. Bryant has said, "Madness so dominates the landscape of his humor that a second reading is necessary to recognize its other features." When another humorist not long ago published a volume called A Bed of Neuroses, he might well have used a picture of Mr. Benchley's four-poster for a frontispiece.

Walter Blair, "Crazy Men," in his Horse Sense in American Humor from Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash, The University of Chicago Press, 1942, pp. 274-94.