Tag: Boredom

“Browsing Through the Passport” (E64)

  • Originally printed:  Detroit Athletic Club News, August 1930
  • First reprinted in:  Chips Off the Old Benchley (1949)
  • Original Byline: Robert Benchley; Drawings by Gluyas Williams

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Comments:

Here Benchley details the first world torments of the bourgeois caught in bureaucratic amber on the deck of a homecoming Transatlantic liner. The indignities of international travel are bad enough, RB says, without the U.S. government making an open question of the sojourner’s right to return to their native shore, or at least to get away from the gang of floating drips they’ve been cooped up with for a few thousand nautical miles. We get a lot more Benchleyan bashing of red tape and protocols designed expressly to catch a man halfway between his favorite speakeasy and the 12-mile limit.

At such times, the defenseless subject of Foucauldian discipline is wont to take solace in any means of distraction handy. But what is handy when you’re quarantined in a queue and your gear is stowed in a steamer trunk? Well… people… certainly… lots of people around, but Benchley has already made short sport of that option – this bunch of Babbitts all paid $3000 to sight-see during the depths of the Depression! All you’ve got, really, in this extremity, is the legalistic fine print and the arcane customs scribblings in your passport, which our author turns to with the desperate gusto of a child absorbing the B Vitamin complex data set on a box of Corn Crackos. You can’t fight city hall, but you can take refuge in its inane publications.   

Favourite Moment:

Standing in line waiting for Uncle Sam to look at your tongue or hanging around on deck waiting for the tide to turn, there is nothing like a little red passport to while away the time. And what a bit of reading-matter that is!

Reprint Notes:

  • None of the 3 Gluyas Williams illustrations from the original magazine were reprinted. A new Gluyas Williams drawing (with shortened caption “Shipmates suddenly seem very dull”) has been added.  
  • Topical 1930 reference to “all those Americans who weren’t going to Europe this summer because of the old Wall Street plague of last November” has been replaced with the prosperously straightforward: “all those Americans who went to Europe this summer.”

“The Brave Illusion” (E55)

  • Originally printed:  Collier’s, May 20, 1922
  • First reprinted in:  Never reprinted
  • Original Byline:  Robert C. Benchley (with illustrations by Ray Rohn)

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Comments:

Sooner or later, every Benchley fan, biographer, and encomiast must reckon with a defining aporia in the humorist’s life – the moment he reinvented himself as exactly the same person he had always been. During the past couple of hundred years, thousands – probably millions – of men have morphed from budget-conscious, maritally faithful, teetotalers into financially reckless debauchees. No other human being has ever made this transition without the slightest change in the quality of their humour, their sense of commitment to other people, and their basic stance toward the cosmos.  

Only Robert Benchley.

Even if he’d never written a word, Benchley would’ve made an irresistible subject for an inquiry into the possibilities and limitations of wry good humour raised to a Transcendental value; but it is impossible to conceive of Benchley without his words – the pixelated exoskeleton that held his genial essence intact once he crossed the alcoholic Rubicon in 1920.

What does any of that have to do with this piece from Collier’s? Not much, probably, although this is a very early (pre-emptive?) formulation of the thesis that still makes its way into many bullet-pointed accounts of his baffling trajectory – i.e. after opposing the consumption of alcohol on moral grounds throughout the 1910s, Benchley reversed himself after the passage of Prohibition laws and took up residence in a bottle on a contrarian lark. This essay likens the impulse behind that act (attributed to Benchley’s friend “Lou”) to the naturally libertarian whims of irresponsible youth – whims that the author deems “a bore”. Writing in 1922, Benchley could not have known what the next 23 years held in store for him, but from our perspective we can infer that, regardless of the specific reason for his decision to take that first drink, his decision to continue down that road long past Prohibition’s expiration date may have had a great deal to do with his sense of himself as a bore.

We know he was no such thing – but that doesn’t help much, does it?          

Favourite Moment:

Better a stolen raw potato passed from hand to hand than the cookies of respectability.