[.ca] The Benchley Roundup: A Selection by Nathaniel Benchley ... (ISBN 0226042189)

From Amazon.com:
Robert Benchley's wit appears effortless--it is a blend of autobiography, satire, the inconsequential, and the sudden surprise. At the start of "Fall In!" he muses, "It may be because I do not run as fast, or as often, as I used to, but I seem to be way behind on my parades. It must be almost a year since I saw one, and then I was in it myself." At one time Benchley was everywhere, a prolific reviewer and ubiquitous actor and screenwriter; now we must be grateful for his son's selection of humorous sketches. The Algonquian witster remains as brilliantly nonplused as ever as he observes his species in all its skewed play--from football's confusions to the folly of footnoters to French for Americans. When Benchley declared, "The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him," he can surely not have been looking to himself. James Thurber's remark seems truer: "One of the greatest fears of the humorous writer is that he has spent three weeks writing something done faster and better by Benchley in 1919."

A genuinely great American humorist:
I only found out about Benchley from a short book on Algonquin Round table quotes but I'm very thankful for it--it's shameful that Benchley has basically been forgotten. Why on earth should such a gifted, briliant comic writer be so little known nowadays? There's simply no reason I can think of. He's just as good as Perelman or Thurber, and he deserves much wider reading. This anthology is a pretty good collection of his work, featuring most of his more popular and beloved pieces. What one notices about Benchley is that he really isn't quite so gentle and affectionate in his humor as those who remember him say--he was the original master of what he termed the "dementia praecox" (crazy written humor basically)and when he applies this to ordinary life or parodies bad writing he can be quite cutting. His style is just about perfect--simple but carefully constructed to wring every laugh it can out of subtleties of phrasing and syntax. His parodies of academic writing are among the greatest ever, effortlessly exposing the bad ideas, pretension and willful obfuscation that lurk beyond so many professors' works. His humor is that of a good natured man so bewildered with the modern world that he defends himself with humor, and depending upon the situation that humor can be quietly observant or fast and crazy, therefore reducing its target to nonsense as well. This book needs to be re-printed with a beter cover, and it wouldn't hurt to add more stories to make it a definitive overview of the man's work. Having done so, the book should be aggresively marketed so that it ends up in the humor section of every bookshop in the land. It's the least Benchley, one our greatest American comic writers, deserves.

Wonderful writer, so don't buy this book.:
I love Benchley's work. I began reading "My Ten Years in a Quandary..." as a child at the cottage nearly forty years ago. I can still read that tattered book and enjoy it immensely. I am less thrilled by this compilation--can't always agree with Nathaniel Benchley's choices and miss some of Gluyas Williams sketches that have been dropped. Get one of the original collections--starting with, if you want, "My Ten Years..." and then, when you decide that you want everything the man ever wrote, you won't be buying stories you already have.

Effortlessly funny prose by a master:
"A great many people have come up to me and asked me how I manage to get so much work done while looking so dissipated. My answer is 'Don't you wish you knew?' and a pretty good answer it is, too, when you consider that nine times out of ten I didn't hear the original question." That's Benchley. Note the easy, flowing, understated prose (read: no disgusting postmodern Latinizing) that marked this extraordinary humorist's observations on life in America and abroad. Benchley wrote about everything, and everything he wrote showed the same magical mix of cynicism and whimsy.

A must read for all serious humorists:
If you could judge a book by it's cover, you would assume that this book went out of print around about 1964. This is really too bad, because when you try to resell it on Amazon or eBay it will really reduce the price you can ask for it. Robert Benchley, who died in 1945, wielded an extremely dangerous sense of humor that tragically took the lives of many of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, there is no disputing that his work has influenced so many American humorists that it's not even funny. From Woody Allen, Dave Barry, Steve Martin, Regis Philbin and many others to an unknown reviewer like me who is trying desperately to be funny, there is really no comparison.