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Other authors named Robert:
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Author's popularity: 3
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Popularity: 1
Vote: | A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | An ardent supporter of the hometown team should go to a game prepared to take offense, no matter what happens. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he's supposed to be doing at the moment. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | As for me, except for an occasional heart attack, I feel as young as I ever did. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Behind every argument is someone's ignorance. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Dachshunds are ideal dogs for small children, as they are already stretched and pulled to such a length that the child cannot do much harm one way or the other. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with that it's compounding a felony. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Even nowadays a man can't step up and kill a woman without feeling just a bit unchivalrous. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | For a nation which has an almost evil reputation for bustle, bustle, bustle, and rush, rush, rush, we spend an enormous amount of time standing around in line in front of windows, just waiting. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I can't seem to bring myself to say, "Well, I guess I'll be toddling along." It isn't that I can't toddle. It's that I can't guess I'll toddle. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I do most of my work sitting down; that's where I shine. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things, and I have succeeded fairly well. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I know I'm drinking myself to a slow death, but then I'm in no hurry. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | If Mr. Einstein doesn't like the natural laws of the universe, let him go back to where he came from. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Most of the arguments to which I am a party fall somewhat short of being impressive, owing to the fact that neither I nor my opponent knows what we are talking about. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Tell us your phobias and we will tell you what you are afraid of. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The free-lance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini? |
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Biography
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Robert Charles Benchley (September 15, 1889 in Worcester, Massachusetts – November 21, 1945) was an American humorist, newspaper columnist, film actor, and drama editor.
His essays were published in collections including Of All Things, Benchley Beside Himself, Inside Benchley, and Chips Off the Old Benchley. His books were illustrated by Gluyas Williams, whose spare, knowing line drawings added to Benchley's success.
Benchley's humor was based on everyday life, news oddities, and absurd, almost surreal essays such as his "Uncle Edith" series. At Harvard, he was a leading contributor to the Harvard Lampoon. With Dorothy Parker and Robert E. Sherwood, his colleagues at the original Life magazine, Benchley formed the Algonquin Round Table. He was an early and regular contributor to the New Yorker Magazine. His style influenced other humorists such as S. J. Perelman and James Thurber.
Film work In 1928, Benchley starred in The Treasurer's Report, a short comedy film that was possibly the first all-talkie film shown in theaters (as opposed to The Jazz Singer (1927), which was primarily silent, and The Lights of New York (later in 1928), the first full-length talkie feature film). This led to a series of more than three dozen comedic instructional short films whose titles frequently began with "How to…". Each featured Benchley as a lecturer or as his family man alter-ego, Joe Doakes. How to Sleep (1935) won an Academy Award in 1938.
At the same time, he found frequent work, at several studios, as a character actor in feature films, often playing a variation on the befuddled burgher of his shorts or else a dipsomaniacal sophisticate. He appears in Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, in Rene Clair's I Married a Witch and with Fred Astaire in The Sky's the Limit.
Benchley also appeared in the 1941 feature film The Reluctant Dragon, giving a loose tour of the then-new Walt Disney Studios facility in Burbank, California.
Benchley was awarded a star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood. He is the father of author Nathaniel Benchley and grandfather of Jaws writer Peter Benchley.
On his passing in 1945, Robert Benchley was interred in the family plot at Prospect Hill Cemetery in Nantucket, Massachusetts.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Robert Benchley".
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