Starring Robert Benchley;: "those magnificent movie shorts."

Description from the book flap: To moviegoers in the 1930s and 1940s, Robert Benchley's face was a familiar as that of the man next door. Although he reached his widest audience through the movies, Benchley began as a writer, best known for the hundreds of humorous essays in which he represented himself as the bungling little man or the purveyor of bewildering information. The forty-eight short subjects starring and written by Robert Benchley were all based directly or indirectly on his printed humor. In effect, Benchley was translating his humor into a different medium for the sake of a new audience. Dr. Redding's study of Benchley's screen humor examines the process by which this translation took place. Many readers will be surprised to learn that Benchley never directed a single film, for all the comedy short subjects in which he starred are unquestionably his own work. His ability to determine so successfully the form and content of his films can be accounted for partly by the economics of the big studios, which left short-subject production largely free of the tight control exercised over more expensive feature-length films. In addition, Benchley's refusal to take films very seriously made it difficult for any producer or director to influence the final form of his work: he sometimes virtually ad-libbed his lectures or wrote his scripts at the last minute, and since he never acted in the conventional sense - he always played himself one way or another - he could not really be directed.