Chips Off the Old Benchley

by Robert Benchley

  It’s their own fault that I am late. They print blanks for you to fill out, then pass a bill making the blanks no good, then send the blanks out anyway, with a little red slip telling you to disregard the blanks. If I had done a thing like that to them, what a howl they would have set up! I would have been just an old slipshod bungler, an impractical writer-man. But the Government can go out of its way to confuse and rattle me, and that’s all right. Well, the Government makes me sick, that’s what the Government does. And it always has, too.

  In the first place, the little red slip got lost just as soon as I had taken it out of the envelope, so I never saw what it said. I can’t sit right down the minute my blank comes and fill it out. I have certain other things which have to be attended to, although the Government may not think so. And a little red slip is very easily mislaid or lost these days. I don’t suppose the Government ever loses anything, oh no! They’re perfect!

  Well, I lost the red slip and when I came to fill out my blank I filled it out according to printed instructions as every law-abiding citizen should. I took it for granted that the blank was right. I knew that it was gosh-darned unfair but I did think that it was technically correct. When a government is over a hundred and fifty years old one naturally assumes that it can, at least, put out correct printed matter. This is where I evidently made my first mistake.

  My second mistake came in handling the “7’s” and “8’s.” I always have had trouble in adding and subtracting “7’s” and “8’s.” Even when I was in the thick of school arithmetic, adding and subtracting like mad every day of the year, the “7’s” and “8’s” seemed to me to be very complicated and tricky numbers and now that I have occasion to add and subtract only occasionally they throw me into something of a panic. If nobody is looking, I can get out of the jam by using my fingers to count on, but I rather hate, at my age, to be seen at it. In fact, I have been known to wait fifteen or twenty minutes until people left the room rather than count “7” and “8” on my fingers in front of them. All this time the mathematical problem at hand has been held up. If it is a rush job, and there are people in the room, I put my fingers in my pocket and rattle off the “7’s” and “8’s” there. Also, this year, I got a book from my bank telling all about deductions, and this served only to confuse me. In the past, rather than go into the thing thoroughly, I have cheated myself unmercifully by claiming only the deductions that I could understand, such as two children and the Red Cross. (It is very evident that the Treasury officials have no children of their own if they think that $400 covers even the shoe-leather expense of one child.) But this year a businessman acquaintance told me that I was a fool not to deduct expenses to which I was legitimately entitled by the nature of my business, and gave me this book from the bank outlining the various forms of money-saving which come under the law.

  I hadn’t got very far in this book before I was tempted to go back to my old system of giving the Government everything except my two children and the Red Cross. Sec. 23(b) mentions “a reasonable allowance for depletion in case of oil wells, mines, etc.” Now, I don’t own an oil well or a mine, but an oil well in which I had a small financial interest certainly was depleted during 1929, a depletion which amounted practically to complete elimination, and I ought to get a little something off on that, I should think. But I have also learned that most of the items which one would think could be legitimately deducted are just the ones which can’t be.

  My garden, for instance, which really ought to come in under the “etc.” in the “oil wells, mines, etc.” clause, being a source of something or other (mostly radishes) which comes out of the ground, is probably not deductible. It was a big disappointment as a garden and I hardly got my bait back out of it, but I know that, if I went to the Government and said “Look at here! If a depleted oil well or mine can be written off, what about those string beans which I went to all the bother of planting (and my time is money, too) and which came up backwards and full of old threads?” I can just hear the Government laugh at the very suggestion. One of those nasty, unpleasant laughs.

  A little farther on in the book I found, under Sec. 25(a) “dividends received from domestic corporations, except corporations taxable under Section 251 of the law and corporations organized under the China Trade Act.” Now I am frank to say that I do not know about the China Trade Act. I don’t really suppose that it applies to me, but how am I to be sure? In Supplement K there is a paragraph (d) which is headed: “Definition of China” which says: “As used in this section the term ‘China’ shall have the same meaning as when used in the China Trade Act, 1922.” This more or less brings us back to where we were in the beginning. If the Government thinks that it has cleared up anything at all in that “definition of China,” it is crazy. I sometimes wonder if it isn’t anyway.

  This is where I stood on the evening of March 14th, the night before the Treasury Department’s Christmas. I had about decided to let the whole thing go as it was and take my losses, when one of my neighbors, a brisk, rosy-cheeked man who always gets everything right, came in, glowing with health after a tramp through the country, and said: “Well, did you remember to make your one per cent reduction?”

  At first I thought that he was kidding me about a tonic which I am supposed to be taking for my metabolism and said “Yes,” very curtly.

  “There’ll be an awful lot of boobs who didn’t,” he said, smacking his lips.

  “What do you mean – one per cent reduction?” I asked, trying not to appear too interested.

  “In your income tax,” he explained. “The thing Congress passed after the blanks were printed. The blanks are all wrong, you know.” He began to suspect that I hadn’t known about it and beamed accordingly.

  “Oh, that!” I replied, not willing to give him the satisfaction of gloating over me. “Oh, sure!”

  After he had gone, a little crestfallen, I made inquiries and learned about the little red slip which I had lost. I say “lost” because I suppose that I did have one in my envelope, although I wouldn’t put it past the Government to have deliberately neglected to send me one. They will go to any lengths once they have got a grudge against you.

  This meant that I had to do the whole thing over again. It didn’t seem as if I could go through with it. Everything went black before my eyes and I sank down in my chair burying my head in my hands. When I was strong enough I got the blank out of the envelope which I had stamped all ready to send off. (I never trust those envelopes which say up in the corner that no stamp is necessary. It is worth two cents to be sure that your letter is really going to be delivered and not kicked about for months in a post office for insufficient postage.) I looked at the neat little figures in which I had done my reckoning – my figures may be wrong, but they are neat – and realized that I should have to get a new blank and begin fresh on the nightmare which had been tormenting me for two weeks. I must have fainted at this point, for I found myself in bed with an ugly gash on the back of my head. Perhaps I had even attempted suicide.

  And now, after a week of trying to compute a tax of ½ per cent instead of 1½ per cent on the first $4,000 and a tax of 2 per cent instead of 3 per cent on the next $4,000 and a tax of 4 per cent instead of 5 per cent on the remainder (if there is a remainder), I have about decided to take a leaf from the Government’s book and pull an “erratum” on them.

  I will send in my tax-return just as I had it in the first place. In the envelope with it I will enclose a printed sheet headed “Instruction” on which I will say:

  1. Enter on Line 10, Art. 6, Sec. 11 all receipts, fiduciary or otherwise, charged off to obsolescence of either subsection (b) or (c), if, for the taxable year 1926 or 1927 within the Provisions of the Revenue Act of 1926 or 1928 the amount of such net loss shall be allowed as a deduction in computing the net income for the two succeeding taxable years to the same extent and in the same manner as a net loss sustained for one taxable year under Art. 8, Sec. 3 of the China Trade Act, allowed as a deduction fo
r the two succeeding taxable years.

  2. Enter as Item 3 all items heretofore designated as Items 4, 6 and 9 in Schedule C, except such items as shall hereinafter be designated as Items 5, 2 and 7 if the net income for the period ending during the second calendar year which the portion of such period falling within such calendar year is of the entire period; and (2) any and all such items, 4 or otherwise, as you jolly well please.

  To this sheet I will attach a little red slip reading: NOTICE TO INTERNAL REVENUE COLLECTORS. Read carefully before trying to make out Form 1040.

  Since the Individual Income Tax Return, Form 1040, for the Calendar Year 1929 was made out, the Joint Resolution of Congress reducing the rates of normal income tax for the calendar year 1929 has been called to my attention.

  Throughout this form, therefore, read ½% for 1½%, 3% for 4%, and 4% for 5%. Figure it out for yourself and fill in the enclosed blank check for whatever you make the amount due to be.

  I know that the Government will gyp me if I leave it up to them like this, but I can’t be bothered with the thing any more.

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  The Menace of

  Buttered Toast

  * * *

  Maybe I am a fool, but I want to go in for bulb culture. Oh, I know there is no money in it! I know that I shall just get attached to the bulbs when I shall have to give them away to somebody who wants to grow crocuses or tulips or something, and there I shall be, alone in that great, big, lonely old house that my grandfather, the Duke, left me.

  This will mean, naturally, that I shall have to give up writing for a living. This God-given talent which I have must be tossed aside like an old mistress (or is it “mattress”?) and my whole energy must be devoted to the creation and nurture of little bulbs which someday will grow into great, big, ugly crocuses, defacing beautiful green lawns all over the country. But I feel the call, and what else is there to do?

  Now, since I am resolved to abandon the belles-lettres, the only decent thing is to pass on the secret of word magic to someone else. Having held the reading public spellbound for years with my witchery, I must disclose its secret in order that some poor sucker may take it up and carry on the torch, bringing cheer to the sick and infirm and evasive notes to Brooks Brothers and the Westchester Light and Power Company. I have therefore decided to set down here the magic formula, by means of which I have kept the wolf from getting upstairs into the bedrooms. Here is a sample of a typical Benchley piece:

  Personally, if you ask me (and, so far as I have heard, nobody has asked me yet, but I shall go right ahead just the same), I feel that we, as a nation (and when I say “as a nation” I mean “as a nation”) eat too much buttered toast.

  Buttered toast is all right, provided neither of my little boys butters it (my two little boys seem to have an idea that butter grows on trees, when everybody knows that it is cut in great sheets by a butter-cutter [butter-cutter, butter-cutter, where have you been?] whence it is shipped to the stamping-room where it is stamped by large blonde ladies with their favorite initials and done up in bundles of twenty-five to be sent to the Tissue Paper Department for wrapping), but I do think, and I am sure that you would think so, too, if you gave the thing a minute’s thought, that there is such a thing as overdoing buttered toast.

  In the first place, you order breakfast. (By ordering breakfast, I mean that you get up out of bed, go into the kitchen in your bathrobe, cut three slices of whatever happens to be in the bread box [usually cake], toast it, and butter it yourself.) The words “buttered toast” come naturally in any breakfast order. “Orange juice, two four-minute eggs, buttered toast, and coffee.” Buttered toast and coffee must be spoken together, otherwise you will hear from the State Department.

  Here is where we make our big mistake. If, for once (or even twice), we could say “coffee” without adding “buttered toast,” it wouldn’t be so bad, but, as my old friend President James Buchanan, used to say (he was President more as a favor to Mrs. Buchanan than anything else), “You can’t eat your cake and eat it too.”

  It being Christmas Eve (or isn’t it? I am all mixed up), we ought not to be very hard on buttered toast, because it was on a Christmas Eve that buttered toast was invented. There were six of us (five counting the Captain) all seated around an old stove (the stove was only eleven years old, but that seemed old in those days, and I guess that it is old for a stove), when up spoke Baby Puggy, the daughter of the termagant.

  “What’s all this?” said Baby Puggy. (All what never seemed to occur to her to explain, and if she was satisfied, what the hell are you kicking about?)

  “I am in no state to bandy legs about,” replied her uncle, who, up to this time, had entirely monopolized the conversation.

  “I am getting awfully sick of this sort of thing,” said Old Doctor Dalyrimple (they called Dr. Dalyrimple “old” because he was 107, and a very good reason, too, for calling him old), “and I have a good mind to go home and go to bed.”

  “You are in bed, but you’re not at home,” piped up little Primrose, a frightful child. “They gave your bed at home away to the Salvation Army.”

  “It serves them right – I mean the Salvation Army,” said Old Doctor Meesky (who had changed his name from Dalyrimple to Meesky since we last saw him). And there, so far as anybody can tell, ends the story of Little Red Mother Hubbard, and, I can almost hear you say, “Who cares?”

  But about buttered toast. (Not that I care about buttered toast, and not that I think you care.) If we are to have buttered toast brought to us on our breakfast trays (or is it “drays”?) I would suggest the following ways to get around the unbearable boredom of the thing:

  1. Have the Football Rules Committee decree that no buttered toast shall be dunked in coffee which does not fill at least one-half (¾) the cup. This will do away with fumbling.

  2. Nobody connected with the theater, either in a managerial capacity (this includes calling “half-hour” and holding up the left leg of the tenor’s trousers while he is stepping into the right leg) or as an actor (God knows what this includes) shall sell tickets to any performance for more than $11.50 over and above the box office price – or, at any rate, shall not boast about it.

  3. My two small boys shall not throw paper airplanes so that they hit Daddy any nearer his eye than his temple.

  4. I forget what this rule is.

  5. I remember this, but wish I hadn’t.

  6. Nobody named “Cheeky” shall be allowed to compete.

  This, I think, will fix matters up. And if you find that your buttered toast has become soggy after having lain under a small china Taj Mahal with a hole in the top (maybe the real Taj Mahal has a hole in the top, for all I know. It ought to have, to let all those people in and out) then just send for the Captain (you remember the Captain!) and tell your troubles to him (song cue: “Tell Your Troubles to the Captain. He Will Weather or Not”).

  But I do think that something has got to be done about buttered toast. I am not one to cavil (cavil me back to Old Virginny) but I do think, if you ask me (and I don’t remember anyone’s asking me [oh, I guess I said that in the beginning of this article. Sorry!]), I do think, personally, that – where was I?

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  A Belated Tribute

  * * *

  I am terribly sorry about being so late in paying some attention to the Sir Walter Scott centenary. I don’t know what you will think of me, and as for the Scots – Good Lord, I won’t dare show my face around there for a year!

  Well, all that I can say is that I was out of town during September, when the centenary was going on, and even after I got back, it was a good month before I got any news of the literary world (a very good month, in fact). Of course, nobody ever took the trouble to let me know there was a centenary on. Oh, no! I must keep track of such things myself. Oh, yes! If it weren’t for the fact that I have been waiting a hundred years to take a crack at the Waverley Novels (or “Lea
ther-stocking Tales,” as I used to call them on my examination papers), I would be tempted to let the whole thing slide, now that it has gone this long.

  But I happen to have a peculiar lack of interest in Scott, and so may be able to contribute something unique to Waverliana, in view of the fact that, in my youth, every time I changed schools (which was quite often, my grandfather having been King of the Gypsies), the new English class was just beginning to study “Ivanhoe.” I am the boy who has taken every word out of “Ivanhoe” and put it back eight times. There was a time when I had “Ivanhoe poisoning” so badly that, at the sight of the Ginn & Co. edition, I would scream and yank the tablecloth off with all the dishes on it. I still twitch my withers slightly at the mention of the name Rowena. I don’t suppose that one should speak disparagingly of the dead, but there was a long time when I could have easily done without Sir Walter Scott.

  It was in this mood, then, that I began my studies into the life and times of the creator of the Waverley Novels, and, after many trips to Abbotsford, Liddesdale, and all over the place, I now find myself with a collection of some of the worst-fitting data to be found in the Highlands, which, I am sure, will match in interest most of the anecdotes which have been distributed recently in honor of the centenary. In addition, I also saw many interesting sights in London.

  We hear a great deal about the financial remuneration which Sir Walter’s writings brought him in. It is said that his income was £10,000 a year (I have just discovered that I have a £ sign on my typewriter! I am afraid that you will have to pardon me while I use it just a little more. It comes out so neat and black. £50,000 minus £30,000 equals £20,000 plus £15,000, £5,000, £8,000 – oh well, while I’m at it I might as well make it good – £500,000, £750,000, £3,000,000! There, I feel better!) Let’s see, where were we?