* * *
BITS AND PIECES
* * *
Selected Sketches
by
Robert Benchley
* * *
About this Ebook
Bits and Pieces
Selected Sketches by
Robert Benchley
(1889-1945)
* * *
Robert Charles Benchley was an American humorist, actor, and drama critic. His main persona, that of a slightly confused, ineffectual, socially awkward bumbler, served in his essays and short films to gain him the sobriquet “the humorist’s humorist.” The character allowed him to comment brilliantly on the world’s absurdities. (—Encyclopedia Britannica)
Benchley's humor influenced and inspired many humorists and filmmakers, among them E. B. White, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Horace Digby, Woody Allen, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, and Dave Barry.
Benchley is best remembered for his contributions to periodicals such as Life, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. Collections of these essays and articles stand today as tribute to his brilliance.
* * *
This ebook was created by E.C.M. for MobileRead.com, January 2016.
This ebook may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes.
Contents first published in various periodicals circa 1921~1943.
The text of this book is in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+70” or less.
* * *
Text was obtained from archive.org (The Best of Robert Benchley). Punctuation, italics, and diacritics have been formatted. Chapter-end links provide access to table of contents and title index.
Due to copyright restrictions, illustrations (by various artists) have been omitted.
Embedded font:
(licensed for re-distribution)
“Special Elite” by Brian Bonlislawsky.
Validation by Pagina Epub Checker.
* * *
* * *
Contents
* * *
BITS AND PIECES Titlepage
About This Ebook
Get a giggle here: Back in Line
What Time Is It?
Greetings From—
Defying the Conventions
Ill Will Toward Men
Little Noise Abatement
The Truth about Thunderstorms
A Little Sermon on Success
How the Doggie Goes
Here You Are— Taxi!”
Tell-Tale Clues
The Helping Hand
Announcing a New Vitamin
Inherent Vice: Express Paid
Sand Trouble
The Tourist Rush to America
The Eel-Snooper
What Are Little Boys Made Of?
The Big Coal Problem
Hiccoughing Makes Us Fat
“Abandon Ship!”
What of Europe?
A History of Playing Cards
Yesterday’s Sweetmeats
More Work Ahead
Atom Boy!
A Brief Course in World Politics
Our News-Reel Life
“Over the Top”
Is the Sea Serpent a Myth or a Mythter?
Swat the Tsk-Tsk Midge!
The Railroad Problem
“Accustomed as I Am—”
Yarns of an Insurance Man
The Pincus Wall Paintings
What About Business?
Indian Fakirs Exposed
Bunk Banquets
Laughter and Applause
When the State Plays Papa
Special Anthropological Extra!
A Trip to Spirit Land
Around the World with the Gypsy Jockey
Around the World Backward
For the Entertainment Committee
The Return of the Bicycle
What Does Your Boy Read?
Index of Titles
* * *
* * *
BITS AND PIECES
* * *
Back in Line
* * *
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. It would be all right if we were Spanish peasants and could strum guitars and hum, or even stab each other, while we were standing in line, or East Indians who could just sit cross-legged and simply stare into space for hours. Nobody expects anything more of Spanish peasants or East Indians, because they have been smart enough to build themselves a reputation for picturesque lethargy.
But we in America have built ourselves reputations for speed and dash, and are known far and wide as the rushingest nation in the world. So when fifty of us get in a line and stand for an hour shifting from one foot to the other, rereading the shipping news and cooking recipes in an old newspaper until our turn comes, we just make ourselves look silly.
Most of this line-standing is the fault of the Government, just as everything else which is bad in our national life is the fault of the Government, including stone bruises and tight shoes. We would have plenty of time to rush around as we are supposed to do, if the Government did not require 500 of us to stand in one line at once waiting for two civil service employees to weigh our letters, thumb out income-tax blanks, tear off our customs slips or roll back our eyelids. Of course, there are times when we stand in line to see a ball game or buy a railroad ticket, but that is our affair, and in time we get enough sense to stop going to ball games or traveling on railroads.
The U.S. Post Office is one of the most popular line-standing fields in the country. It has been estimated that six-tenths of the population of the United States spend their entire lives standing in line in a post office. When you realize that no provision is made for their eating or sleeping or intellectual advancement while they are thus standing in line, you will understand why six-tenths of the population look so cross and peaked. The wonder is that they have the courage to go on living at all.
This congestion in the post offices is due to what are technically known as “regulations” but what are really a series of acrostics and anagrams devised by some officials who got around a table one night and tried to be funny. “Here’s a good gag!” one of them probably cried. “Let’s make it compulsory for the package to be wrapped in paper which is watermarked with Napoleon’s coat of arms. We won’t say anything about it until they get right up to the window, so there will be no danger of their bringing that kind of paper with them. Then they will have to go away again with their bundles, find some paper watermarked with Napoleon’s coat of arms (of which there is none that I ever heard of), rewrap their bundles, and come back and stand in line again. What do you say to that!” This scheme probably threw the little group of officials into such a gale of merriment that they had to call the meeting off and send down for some more White Rock.
You can’t tell me that the post-office regulations (to say nothing of those of the Custom House and Income Tax Bureau) were made with anything else in mind except general confusion. It must be a source of great chagrin to those in charge to think of so many people being able to stick a stamp on a letter and drop it into a mail box without any trouble or suffering at all. They are probably working on that problem at this very minute, trying to devise some way in which the public can be made to fill out a blank, stand in line, consult some underling who will refer them to a superior, and then be made to black up with burned cork before they can mail a letter. And they’ll figure it out, too. They always have.
But at present their chief source of amusement is in torturing those unfortunates who find themselves with a package to send by mail. And with Christmas in the offing, they must be licking their chops with
glee in very anticipation. Although bundles of old unpaid bills is about all anyone will be sending this Christmas, it doesn’t make any difference to the P.O. Department. A package is a package, and you must suffer for it.
It wouldn’t be a bad idea for those of us who have been through the fire to get together and cheat the officials out of their fund this year by sending out lists of instructions (based on our own experience) to all our friends, telling them just what they have got to look out for before they start to stand in line. Can you imagine the expression on the face of a post-office clerk if a whole line of people came up to his window, one by one, each with his package so correctly done up that there was no fault to find with it? He would probably shoot himself in the end, rather than face his superiors with the confession that he had sent no one home to do the whole thing over. And if his superiors shot themselves too it would not detract one whit from the joyousness of the Christmas tide.
So here are the things I have learned in my various visits to the Post Office. If you will send me yours and get ten friends to make a round robin of their experiences, we may thwart the old Government yet.
Packages to be mailed abroad must be:
1. Wrapped in small separate packages, each weighing no more than one pound and seven-eighths (Eastern Standard Time), and each package to be tied with blue ribbon in a sheepshank knot. (Any sailor of fifteen years’ experience will teach you to tie a sheepshank.)
2. The address must be picked out in blue, and re-enforced with an insertion of blue ribbon, no narrower than three-eighths of an inch and no wider than five-eighths of an inch (and certainly not exactly four-eighths or one-half), or else you may have to stay and write it out a hundred times after the Post Office has closed.
3. The package, no matter what size, will have to be made smaller.
4. The package, no matter what size, will have to be made larger.
(In order to thwart the clerk on these last two points, it will be necessary to have packages of all sizes concealed in a bag slung over your back.)
5. The person who is mailing the package must approach the window with the package held in his right hand extended toward the clerk one foot from the body, while with the left hand he must carry a small bunch of lilies of the valley, with a tag on them reading: “Love from – [name of sender] – to the U.S. Post Office.”
6. The following ritual will then be adhered to, a deviation by a single word subjecting the sender to a year in Leavenworth or both:
Clerk’s Question: Do you want to mail a package?
Sender’s Answer: No, sir.
Q. What do you want to do?
A. I don’t much care, so long as I can be with you.
Q. Do you like tick-tack-toe?
A. I’m crazy mad for it.
Q. Very well. We won’t play that.
A. Aren’t you being just a little bit petty?
Q. Are you criticizing me?
A. Sorry.
Q. And high time. Now what do you want?
A. You, dear.
Q. You get along with yourself. What’s in your hand?
A. Flowers for you – dear.
Q. I know that. What’s in the other hand?
A. I won’t tell.
Q. Give it here this minute.
A. You won’t like it.
Q. Give-it-here-this-minute, I say.
The sender reluctantly gives over the parcel.
Q. What do you want to do with this?
A. I want to take it home with me and wrap it up again.
Q. You leave it here, and like it.
A. Please give it back. Please, pretty please?
Q. I will do no such thing. You leave it here and I will mail it for you. And shut up!
The sender leaves the window, sobbing. The clerk, just to be mean, mails the package.
* * *
....... TOC INDEX NEXT
What Time Is It?
And What of It?
* * *
By secretly consulting an old bootleg watch which I hid away (set at Standard Time) under my bed when my native state went daylight-saving, I find that it is a little over a month now since the Cossacks stormed up at the door and forced us to set our clocks an hour ahead. And, at the end of this month, I can give out a definite verdict against daylight-saving. I don’t like it. I don’t care what the reasons for it are. I don’t like it. And beginning tomorrow I, personally, am going back to God’s time. My body may belong to the State, but my soul belongs to Standard Time. If necessary, I will carry the case to the Supreme Court.
Time-keeping is a difficult enough maneuver at best, without monkeying around with an extra hour plus or minus. Just the fact that, when it is noon in New York, it is 5 P.M. in Paris has always worried me, and even now I am more or less inclined not to believe it. And when, last New Year’s, greetings were radioed from New Zealand which reached here on December 31, I went into a sulk which almost spoiled the holidays for my friends. The whole idea is unpleasant to me.
The thing gets worse the farther west you go. When you cross the 180th meridian in the Pacific (so they try to tell me) you lose a whole day, which I very much doubt. If, at the same time, daylight-saving is in effect just at that time, you lose one day and one hour. I suppose that, if someone were to come along and say so, you lose one day, one hour, and one minute. The thing can easily be made absurd.
If everyone knew the trouble that the Western Union goes to in order to fix Standard Time, there wouldn’t be so much tampering with it on the part of the irresponsible legislators. From the United States Naval Observatory they select a list so-called “clock stars.” It is a great honor to be on this list. In order to be on it, a star has to sit very still and not wiggle or whisper, so that its permanent position can be noted in the American Ephemeris or Social Register. The person who told me all this (and who has, for obvious reasons, asked to remain anonymous) says that only stars which cross the meridian within twenty degrees of the zenith are included, “in order that the azimuth error may be small.” Just how large an azimuth error has to be before it becomes large I forgot to ask, but I should imagine that six or seven feet would be pretty big for any azimuth error that you or I would likely to have anything to do with.
Well, sir, after the Western Union has selected its clock stars, it takes a look at them each night through pearl-handled opera glasses, and, according to my informant, in this way finds out what time it is. I am not quite clear on the thing yet, and don’t know whether the stars, if looked at from the right angle, spell out “E-i-g-h-t-f-o-r-t-y-t-h-r-e-e.” However, the experts at the Western Union can tell, and I suppose that is all that matters. If I knew what it was they did, and how they were able to tell time by the stars, I should be an expert at the Western Union. That is, of course, provided that I was socially acceptable to the present experts
But, on the whole, I think that I shall keep out of any jobs which involve an understanding of clocks and time-keeping. I can’t even understand my own clocks. I have an alarm clock, a plain, unattractive piece of mechanism which I bought in a drug store about eight years ago. This clock will keep perfect time so long as it is tipped over on its face. If I humor it in this whim, however, it is obvious that I am not going to be able to tell what time it is, because I can’t see the face. I tried once placing it over on its back, but it raised such a fuss that I had to turn it over instantly into its old position.
I have now solved the problem by having it on a table with a coarse wire net for a top instead of a solid piece of wood. So when I want to see what time it is, I simply get down on my hands and knees and look up through the wire, and there, clear as day, is the face of the clock looking down at me with the correct time. This maneuver also serves a double purpose, as it gets me out of bed much more surely than the mere ringing of an alarm will do.
I have had several letters from friends asking me why I didn’t get rid of this clock and get one which would tell time without being coddled; but I have become fond
of “Blushing Bennie,” as I call it (because it is always hiding its face), and I wouldn’t know what to do with a new clock staring directly at me every time I looked at it.
Down in the living room I have a clock which is called a “four-hundred-day” clock, which is supposed to run 400 days without winding. This feat seems to be accomplished by arranging four large cherries on a rotating stem which hangs down out of the works of the clock (clearly visible through the glass cover) and they go slowly round one way and then slowly round the other until the person who is watching them has gone mad. I have got myself trained now so that I can lean against the mantel and watch them rotate for six hours without feeling queer, but people who are not used to it should not try watching for more than fifteen minutes at first. If I have any work to do, it is a great comfort to know that I can always keep from doing it by watching these revolving cherries, for after a while I get hypnotized by the sight and am unable to take my eyes away. I have a man who does nothing else but come and lead me away from the clock whenever I have been there too long or when anyone in the room wants to talk to me.
Sometimes a dash of cold water in my face is necessary, and this is apt to irritate me and make me petulant at first, but when I am myself again I realize that it was for the best and reward the man with a warm smile and a “Well done!”
I don’t know what we are supposed to do with the clock when the 400 days are up, because the directions distinctly said that under no circumstances was it to be touched once it had been started. I suppose that we shall have to throw it away. I shall want to save the cherries, however, and can perhaps learn how to twirl them myself.
Bits and Pieces Page 1