Knight of the Round Table

October 10, 2010 8:36 AM

Are you feeling blue? Suffer from insomnia? Need career advice? Have dietary concerns? Want to know more about sex? Wonder how the market is doing and your finances? Never fear, Sweet Old Bob is here
posted by timsteil (15 comments total)

Thanks for these links! I was a huge Benchley fan when I was a kid...read everything he wrote. Even have one of his 16mm shorts. The life he wrote about took place in the time my father grew up, so the zeitgeist he wrote about was so distant from my own...I was gobsmacked when one of my 16 year old students turned out to be a Benchley fanatic, too. I like to think he was not unaware of the Surrealist movement.

Then I grew up and turned into an S.J. Perelman fan. (Currently channeled by Woody Allen twice a year in the New Yorker.)
posted by kozad at 8:46 AM on October 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

Thanks a million! I love, love, love Robert Benchley (and Perelman, and Parker) and had no idea these existed. Heck, it's not that easy to find print anthologies -- or wasn't a few years ago when last I checked.
posted by FelliniBlank at 8:49 AM on October 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

My favorite Benchley quote (appropriate to this recent discussion of procrastination) is

"Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment."

I usually have cause to recall it several times a day.
posted by Faze at 9:56 AM on October 10, 2010 [2 favorites]

Faze, your soundtrack for the day.
posted by timsteil at 10:03 AM on October 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

that Never Fear link is fall-down funny. Great post!
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:15 AM on October 10, 2010

I performed one of Bechley's acts for the release of my first book, so I approve of this.
posted by The Whelk at 11:17 AM on October 10, 2010

Looks like it's a version of his most famous sketch, the Treasurer's Report from (ominously) 1928.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:21 AM on October 10, 2010

That's the bit I did! Except I got ...considerably more nude by the end.
posted by The Whelk at 11:42 AM on October 10, 2010

That's the bit I did! Except I got ...considerably more nude by the end.
posted by The Whelk

video or it never happened!
posted by timsteil at 1:16 PM on October 10, 2010

I have no idea what that first link has to do with "feeling blue."

I've seen some of these shorts somewhere, must have been Turner Classic Movies channel or something. I love Benchley.

BTW it is worth noting that second link, "How To Sleep" won the 1936 Academy Award for Best Comedy Short.
posted by charlie don't surf at 5:17 PM on October 10, 2010

I've loved anything to do with anything Algonquin-Round-Table-related since I saw "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" when I was home sick from school. Which I suspect makes me some kind of poser. But if that doesn't discount my opinion too much, I think these are wonderful.
posted by santaslittlehelper at 8:20 PM on October 10, 2010

I hadn't known about Benchley until today. All I can say is that this is drop dead funny stuff.

What other treasures from the bygone era of motion pictures are locked up in some moldering vault?
posted by PROD_TPSL at 9:52 AM on October 11, 2010

PROD

I truly hope it inspires you to go read some of his early writings, just also, drop dead funny stuff. I, like others in this thread, seem to have discovered him as a dissaffected youth, and took a lot of my worldviews from him.

Whether or not you enjoy them, that's up to you, but please pass them along to the next pissed off 12 year old you know. You will have done a righteous deed, and made the world a better place

a sampler

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700431h.html
posted by timsteil at 1:58 PM on October 11, 2010

I, like others in this thread, seem to have discovered him as a dissaffected youth, and took a lot of my worldviews from him.

A friend of mine reads Benchley pieces to his small children at bedtime, so yeah, he's pretty much setting them up for a lifetime of square-peg-itude.
posted by FelliniBlank at 5:01 PM on October 11, 2010

A friend of mine reads Benchley pieces to his small children at bedtime, so yeah, he's pretty much setting them up for a lifetime of square-peg-itude.

You have a very cool friend. Do me a solid and give him a fist bump, a bro hug. No actually, stuff your silk handkerchief back in you pocket and sneer at him, Really now. I say. That was uncalled for.
posted by timsteil at 5:18 PM on October 11, 2010