My father was a great Benchley fan and had a couple of his books and humor anthologies that contained Benchley writings. I grew up reading essays like "The Dangers of Singing Bass" and "If Men Played Cards Like Women." Everything he wrote was screamingly funny to me. He's still one of my favorite humorists. Thanks, Roger, for this.

Viewers of Turner Classic Movies, like this writer, are quite familiar with Robert Benchley. TCM runs many of Benchley's shorts in between movies.

Benchley would also pop up in the feature length movies too, like "The Major and the Minor".

Thanks for sharing these Roger. I've never heard of this guy before and watching the first one, "How to Eat", I wasn't sure if it was comedy or not. After "How to Sleep", I get it. The plunger-trumpet music at the beginning reminded me of the Three Stooges music. That was a hint. I watched all four and the sleeping one was my favorite.

I guess there's no index page I can see all your "pages-for-twitter" on the Sun-Times website, huh?

Ebert: Dear Squinty McHaircut, all my Pages for Twitter are listed down the right-hand side of my blog's top page.

They aren't only for Twitter, of course. They're a way for me to exploit the page-building abilities of this software to publish all sorts of stuff.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/

They stay alive for quite a time, and then I keep the wheat and kill the chaff.

Thanks Roger! I really enjoy reading your stuff and I joined twitter because of you. I really admire you.

Chris

Let us never forget that Benchley was the man who said the world was divided into two types of people: those who divide the world into two types, and those who don't.

Loved the Benchley miniatures! I can see why he and Harpo Marx were such good friends.

Thanks for the Benchley tribute and clips. Of all the things I read when I was young, Benchley's comic essays are the only things I still read - and they still make me laugh just as much as they did fifty years ago. One of the few modern writers who comes close is Dave Berry, which makes sense, because Dave Berry says he, too, loved Benchley in his youth.

Dear Roger,

I love Robert Benchley, and spent much of my youth in my public library, reading his many funny books. Then I would go home and listen to my Firesign Theatre records, and watch the Marx Brothers on tv.

(I never met the Marx Brothers, but I did grow up to work and hang out with the Firesign Theatre, and I was delighted to learn they loved Robert Benchley's writing, too).

This "comedy research" amounted to many hundreds of hours, much more than the time I spent in school. Of course I became a Writer and Filmmaker. What else was I qualified to be?

Thank you for bringing Benchley to the attention of today's world. (In this case, I mean Robert, but his son Nathaniel, and his grandson Peter, who wrote "Jaws," are worthy of attention, too).

Thank you Roger!

Sam Longoria
Producer
Hollywood CA USA
http://samlongoria.blogspot.com