Tag: Xenophobia

“Carnival Week in Sunny Las Los” (E70)

  • Originally printed: DAC News, November 1929
  • First reprinted: The Treasurer’s Report; And Other Aspects of Community Singing  
  • Original Byline:  Robert C. Benchley; Drawings by Gluyas Williams

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Comments:

No cause for celebration here! This one is best avoided unless you’re engaged in a bibliographic undertaking of your own. Of course, it’s never wise to confuse a fictional persona with the author of a piece, but even if you interpret “Carnival Week in Sunny Las Los” as an implicit critique of this callow WASP vacationer’s ethnocentrism and horror of “southern Europeans”, all you get is a string of rancid olfactory gags that, in the words of Benchley’s New England forebear Roger Williams, “stink in God’s nostrils”.

The essay does demonstrate, if this was ever in doubt, that Benchley’s unique sense of whimsey depends heavily upon the context it careens through. As a humorist, he is at his best when he can take two-sided shots at both the little man and his modern American world. Transplant that same suburban stumblebum to the Pyrenees and his qualms and reservations become the barbs and prejudices of a dollar-wielding bully. We’ve examined the perils of this mode before – see “A Brief Study of Dendrophilism” (E60) – but here it finally drags Benchley down to the level of a one-owl rating.

Favorite Moment:

Europe has often claimed that Las Los was not part of it, and in 1356 Spain began a long and costly war with France, the loser to take Las Los and two outfielders.

Reprint Notes:

  • First and third Williams illustrations missing (why on Earth did they leave out the drawing of Benchley and the bull!? It’s the only fun thing about this essay.)

“A Breath from the Pines” (E56)

  • Originally printed:  Life Magazine, October 6, 1921
  • First reprinted in:  Never reprinted
  • Original Byline:  Robert C. Benchley (column header: “The Latest Books”)

🦉🦉🦉🦉

Comments:

Benchley’s first impulse as a critic was never to reach for the knife (unless his Guy Fawkes persona had command of the pen), but sometimes only a knife will do. Your humble chronicler has never read Gene Stratton-Porter, but this piece makes an excellent argument against the advisability of taking the time to experience Her Father’s Daughter, at any rate. Celebrated in her day as a feminist and an ecological activist, Stratton-Porter appears to have embraced (in this late-career novel, at least) one of early-20th century Progressivism’s least savoury side-issues: white supremacist eugenics.

Benchley identifies the book’s protagonist – a homespun huckster for birth rates and “efficacy” – as a proto-Fascist. The term itself wasn’t available to him just yet, as Mussolini’s party was still a year away from power in 1921, so Benchley brings its American analogue into the discussion, nominating this vile character for a fictional leadership position in the distressingly resurgent Ku Klux Klan. What else can you do with a dismal dynamo named “Linda Strong”? As amusing as this takedown is, Benchley’s liberal disgust with all forms of jingoism and chauvinism emerges palpably from the piece, lending a crusading edge to the hilarity rarely seen outside the precincts of the Wayward Press.

Favourite Moment:

Linda Strong is the kind of girl who is ‘just a bully good pal to a fellow’. She is constantly going out on ‘hikes.’ She wears low-heel shoes and common-sense clothes and delivers little three-minute talks on their efficacy during occasional lapses in her ardor for ‘bucking up’ her boy-friends to make them do better in school. And she believes that every woman ought to have at least six children, training them to grow up into fine, strong, virile women and men, fit to fight the Japanese some day.