Bits and Pieces

by Robert Benchley

  It certainly seemed that radio would put a stop to all this. When a man gets up in front of a microphone it doesn’t make any difference whether he has got great, big, brown eyes or no eyes at all. Unless he cares what the musicians think, he doesn’t even have to shave. But his talk has got to be worth listening to or there is going to be a general turning of dials all over the civilized world, leaving him hanging in the middle of a four-syllable word. Or, at least, that is what we all hoped would be the result. I am not so sure now.

  A while ago I listened in on a speech being made in London by George Bernard Shaw, who is a clever guy, too. He was introducing Professor Einstein at some banquet or something – possibly a handout for the unemployed. I couldn’t hear what Professor Einstein said, because just at that time the nest of field mice which live in my radio set began gnawing their way out, getting a couple of beavers to help them. But I did hear Mr. Shaw, and I heard the effect he was having on his audience. There is an old superstition that the English are slow at getting a joke, but I want to tell you that the Englishmen at that banquet were in a laughing mood which bordered on nervous hysteria. They were laughing at commas. All Mr. Shaw had to do was to say, “And, furthermore – ” and the house came down. Of all the push-over audiences I have ever heard, they had the least gag resistance.

  What they would have done if they had heard a real gag is rather terrifying to think about. Blood vessels would have been bursting like toy balloons and the salvage of collar buttons and dress ties which would have flown to the floor might easily have filled twelve baskets.

  I thought at first that something (more than usual) was wrong with my radio, and that I wasn’t getting the last few words of the witty sallies which were being received with such a din. But the next day the papers carried the Shaw speech verbatim, and I found to my horror that I had heard every word. Here is a sample of what set London by the ears that night, with my own italics to indicate its effect on the listeners:

  Mr. Shaw: “Ladies and gentlemen (laughter): When my friend Mr. Wells asked me to take this duty, I could not help wondering whether he realized the honor he was conferring upon me (prolonged laughter), and whether I was able to discharge it adequately. (Three minutes of hysteria.) I felt I could only do my best. (Crashing applause.) Here in London we are still a great factor, but no doubt presently that will be transferred to the United States. (The first real gag, throwing the place into pandemonium.) . . . We have a string of great financiers, great diplomats, and even occasionally an author (intermission while half a dozen listeners with weak hearts are carried out), and we make pictures as we talk.” (Complete collapse of roof, as the diners beat each other in a frenzy.)

  This, then, was the opening of Mr. Shaw’s speech, and I had, with my own ears, heard what it was doing to the hand-picked audience in front of him. There were two possible explanations: first, that it was over my head; and, second, that the entire London group had been up in Room 211 before the banquet commenced and were cockeyed drunk.

  I like a laugh as well as anyone, and I am accustomed to laugh loudly at Mr. Shaw’s plays, occasionally because I am amused, but more often because by laughing at Mr. Shaw’s plays one lets the rest of the audience know that one is on the inside and gets the subtler meanings. But as I listened to the speech of the great man on this occasion, I felt that what few giggles I might be able to throw out would be so inadequate in the face of what was going on in London that I had much better just listen quietly and mind my own business.

  Now this sound effect of an audience in a fever heat of enthusiasm is what is going to save radio speakers. And it has given rise to an entirely new trade, the professional Applause-Donor or Audience-Sitter. They sit in the radio studio – at so much a sit – and on signal from a director, laugh, sob, or beat their hands together. If a really good effect is desired they can be induced to ring cowbells and twirl policemen’s rattles. It is barely possible that Mr. Shaw had a couple of hundred of these at work for him.

  I once made a speech over the radio (there must have been a ship sinking at sea that night, for I never could find anyone who heard it) and, when I entered the studio, I was surprised to see about fifteen people of assorted ages and get-ups sitting very grimly over against the wall. I thought at first that they constituted some choir or team of Swiss bell ringers who were going to follow me on the program, but the announcer told me that they were my audience and that, whenever he gave the signal, they would burst into laughter and applause so that my larger audience in radioland would think that they were listening in on a wow. All that this did was to make me nervous. Furthermore, I could feel that my professional laughers had taken an immediate and instinctive dislike to me.

  I began my speech, after a few salvos of applause from the benches, and for the first couple of times, on signal from the overseer, got a pretty fair assortment of laughs. But as the gags kept getting thinner and thinner I detected a feeling of mutiny stirring through the ranks of my professional audience, and the director had harder and harder work to get anything resembling a genuine-sounding laugh out of his crew.

  He was furious, but, owing to the necessity for silence, was unable to bawl them out or even say, “Come on now, louder!” At last the revolt broke and, just as he had given the signal for a round of laughter and applause, three of the workers got up and tiptoed from the room, automatically resigning from their jobs as they went. Even my paid audience was walking out on me. They were followed by a half a dozen others, who evidently felt that, money or no money, there was such a thing as personal pride, even in their profession. By the time I had finished there was only one of the claque left, and she was asleep.

  The announcer told me, when we got outside, that such a thing had never happened before, and that the company would start a suit against the mutineers the next day, as they were all under contract. He added that it might be better if I left the building by the back entrance, where he would have a cab waiting for me to duck into. I promised that the next time I made a radio speech I would bring my own applause-donors, relatives of mine, if possible, but he said that we would discuss that when the time came.

  So whenever you hear a speech over the air which seems to be knocking the audience cold, you needn’t feel that it is your fault if you don’t like it yourself. Just picture a row of disgruntled workers sitting against the wall of the studio, muttering under their breaths.

  It doesn’t seem possible that Mr. Shaw could have hired so many “supers” as there seemed to have been at this London dinner, but the unemployment situation in London is much worse that it is here and you can probably get people to do anything for money. I’d like to get about a dozen of them over here for my next radio appearance. I’d be a riot.

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  When the State

  Plays Papa

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  I will string along with the radicals on most of their plans for betterment. But there is one item on their schedule which I cannot go for at all. I refer to the raising of children by the state. I don’t think that the state quite realizes what it is letting itself in for.

  Of course a great many mothers and fathers are unfit to raise children beyond the spitting-up stage, and probably most of the crime and maladjustments of today are due to parents having bought ten-year-old suits for fourteen-year-old boys. But even with the state functioning perfectly I can see nothing but confusion in its attempting to bring up children. I can see nothing but confusion in bringing up children anyway.

  Let us suppose, just to drive ourselves crazy, that all children are taken from their parents at the age of two, which is about the age when modern educators begin making children express themselves, whether the children want to express themselves or not. (“Now, Henry Martin Manning, Junior – you go right upstairs and express yourself before you can sit down at the table!”) The two-year-olds, on being packed off, bag and baggage, to the State Department of Nurseries and Child Culture, are registered and filed
under “Worries.” For, with the taking over the children, the state will have to give up worrying about budgets, deficits, or even counter-revolutions. The kiddies will take up practically all of its time.

  In the matter of bathing, for instance. The chairman of the State Bath-Giving Commission will have to be a pretty husky guy who doesn’t mind getting a little wet himself. He will not be able to keep his assistants very long unless this is to be a real dictatorship. Giving a three-year-old child a bath is a job that most governments would not want to take on. A peep into the first annual report of the State Bath-Giving Commission will disclose a paragraph like the following:

  Owing to our limited facilities and the difficulty of obtaining competent labor, the department has made a rather poor showing on the year. Baths were attempted on 14,395 children. Baths completed: 75. Injuries to state officials incurred by slipping and striking chin on edge of tub: 8,390. State officials drenched: 14,395. State officials drowned: 11.

  If this work is to be continued next year, completely new equipment will have to be bought, including elbow guards and knee pads for the employees, together with a larger and more efficient model face cloth. If the department’s appropriation cannot be increased, it is the opinion of the chairman that the project should be abandoned. (As a matter of fact, the chairman is resigning anyway.)

  Of course the whole thing will have to be divided up into subcommittees, and there will be work enough for one whole subcommittee in picking up toys and spoons thrown on the floor by children sitting on high chairs. Here is another committee I do not want to be on. Somebody has got to pick them up, presumably the state. We shall probably get a condition where the official who is supposed to pick up thrown rattles will pass the buck to an underling, who will pass it on to somebody else, with the result that the rattle lies on the floor by the high chair and the child flies into a rage. This is not going to look very pretty for state control, especially if a lot of children fly into rages at once.

  This attempt to raise children as a party pledge is going to make the party in power very vulnerable at each election. The anti-Communist candidate, speaking before a group of enraged parents on the street corner, can say:

  “And, furthermore, voters of the Eighth Ward, what sort of children are our friends turning out? I will tell you. I had occasion the other day to invite one of the state’s children into my house for supper, and I may say that I have never seen a ruder little brat in my whole life. I don’t know what his guardians are thinking of to let him run wild the way he does. His knuckles were dirty, he didn’t answer when spoken to, and, as I said to my wife, if he were a child of mine I would have taken him over my knee and given him a good hiding. If those women at the state nursery would play a little less bridge and pay more attention to their children – our children – we wouldn’t have so many disrespectful little hoodlums growing up into unmangageable pests. This condition of things cannot go on a day longer!”

  Perhaps it would be just as well to let the first Communist government take the kiddies over and then sit back and wait. Pretty soon the parents would find themselves being called to the telephone and asked: “What did you use to do to make Albert eat his peas?” Or, “We do not seem to be able to break Marian of the habit of sticking out her tongue at the officials and saying ‘Nya-a-aya!’ Did you ever have that trouble with her?”

  As it is, state officials are none too efficient. They don’t do very well by the roads, and they made quite a botch of prohibition enforcement. There would be slight chance for graft in raising of children; in fact, it would cost them a tidy sum in pennies for slot machines and odd dimes to fill up dime banks.

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  Special

  Anthropological Extra!

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  We do not want to get the public too excited, and then have to let them down, but we think we’ve found something in the Gobi Desert. By “we” I mean our little anthropological expedition which set out eight years ago to hunt for relics of Ancient Man, got stuck for seven years in Paris what with one thing and another, and now have, at last, reached our destination and goal. We arrived at the Gobi Desert last night. Early this morning we found something. Now, mind you, we do not want to say just yet that it is valuable from an anthropological point of view. But we do know this: if it isn’t valuable from an anthropological point of view, it certainly isn’t valuable from any other. It looks awful.

  Our expedition started out from New York with twelve people, including four red caps, a cameraman, a sound man (with a sound machine for making talking pictures in case we should dig up anything that could talk), Dr. Reeby, who is in charge of the badges and hats, and myself. The other four people decided to come along at the last minute, and I don’t know who they are. Somebody Dr. Reeby met at dinner that night, I guess.

  Then, after we got to Paris and found that we weren’t going to be able to get away to the Gobi Desert for some time (we really didn’t think that it would be seven years, however), we added a few more people to the party, until we finally had about two hundred. This was one of the things which held us up, getting passports for all those extra people. Passports and extra sandwiches.

  Then, too, the Springs were lovely in Paris. We landed there just as the horse-chestnut trees were beginning to blossom, and you know how hard it is to leave Paris when the horse-chestnut trees are in bloom. The funny part of it was that they seemed to stay in bloom all of that year and part of the next. By then we had worn out a lot of our clothes and had to have new ones made, and there were fittings and things to be gone through with, and then the horse-chestnut trees were in bloom again. In the meantime, we were accumulating people.

  When at last, after seven years, we were ready to leave Paris for the Gobi Desert, Dr. Reeby had a three-year-old child who, unfortunately, had to be left behind. This caused quite a little hard feeling. Dr. Reeby maintaining that if some of the people already signed up were to be allowed to go, he saw no reason why his three-year-old child couldn’t. We finally convinced him that it would be impractical, by pointing out that the child would have nobody to play with and might grow up to be near-sighted and perhaps have a camel-fixation, to say nothing of getting full of sand all the time. So the child was placed in the French Senate, where he would have playmates and good food, and we were off!

  And now we come to the interesting part of our trip. As soon as we had reached the border of the Gobi Desert we unpacked, washed up, and started digging immediately before dinner. It was quite a sight to see all two hundred and thirty of us digging like mad, all intent on discovering something of interest for the Museum and the motion-picture company. Some of the party dug so fast and so deep that they had themselves completely out of sight inside of an hour and had to be pulled out by natives. Several, I am afraid, never did get out, as there weren’t quite enough natives to go around. We haven’t definitely checked up yet, or called the roll, but I think that the missing ones are some of those we picked up in Paris, in which case we may just let it go at calling the roll.

  It was Lieut. Raffus, the cameraman, who came upon the first “find.” Owing his inability to think of the word “Eureka!” it was quite some time before he could make his discovery known, but when he did, you may be sure that each and every one of us dropped his pick and ran over to Lieut. Raffus’ excavation. The object which he held up (and dropped almost immediately, saying “Ugh!”) seemed to be a sort of mat, or perhaps I should say muff, or perhaps I might even better say nothing. It was about a foot square, if you can call anything which is rather rounded “square,” and was in a state of fossilization which would have made you laugh.

  “It is a part of the Pliocene stratum (circa 500,000 years B.C.),” I was the first, and only one, to cry.

  “Don’t be so sure,” replied Dr. Reeby. “You haven’t looked on the other side yet.” Dr. Reeby is the careful one in our little party. I will bust his nose some day.

  However, we turned it over rather
gingerly, and there, on the other side, was embroidered some sort of inscription. (See Fig. 15.)

  “Pleistocene that somewhere before,” said the sound man, who is always getting off comical cracks, and the laughter at this one was so general that the inscription was forgotten for the time being. In fact, it is only now that I have come to the writing of my report and daybook, that I remember that we really got nowhere in figuring it out. It is in a bag under the table on which I am writing, but I had much rather not pick it out to examine it. One never can tell where such things have been.

  But we do know this: The thing is very, very old, or else, naturally, very unattractive. Most of the things found in the Gobi Desert are of the Pliocene Age (the difference between Pliocene and Pleistocene is that Pliocene has not so many letters in it and sounds like a mistake when you say it), and I see no reason for not allocating this discovery in this period. I don’t know who is going to contradict us, as we don’t intend showing it to anybody except a few personal friends at home.

  The question now is: Shall we call it a day? We have really been here only about half a day, but we have been away from New York for eight years, and that is a pretty long time. The time in Paris shouldn’t really count, for we had lots of fun there, but, after all, an expedition is an expedition, and there are movies to be made. The movie company is going to be awfully cross if we come back with a lot of shots of the Arc de Triomphe and Zelli’s and only one or two of the Gobi Desert.