Movie Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, Explaining the Theory of the Income Tax)

Joe Doakes [played by Robert Benchley] [Holding up a larger-than-life diagram of a silver dollar]: “This here represents one dollar of your income. Of course, one dollar of your income isn’t as large as this, but we have to take a few liberties.” [Tearing off a piece] “According to the income tax law, 8% of your income comes right off from the start. But if you have another dollar like this [fumbling to catch a smaller piece], there is a penalty: an added 4%, or 12%.” [Tearing off another piece]: “Then comes the supplementary or surprise tax of 45%, which at compound interest, with time and a half for overtime, brings the total beginner’s surtax to a cool 78%. Now, figure on the basis of 3 and a half to 7, with a penalty…we have the supplementary or accrued income tax of 92%.” [Holding up a very thin slice of the original coin, then smiles]. “Now this, you remember, is your dollar.” [It accidentally flies out of his fingers into the air. Looking around but not finding it, he smiles sheepishly again.] “Well, easy come, easy go!”— How to Figure Income Tax (1938), MGM film short written by humorist-actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945), directed by Felix E. Feist

A few weeks ago, when TCM was running one of its assorted distant and more contemporary time-fillers between major presentations on its schedule, I caught this amusing short. I knew instantly that not only would it be appropriate for income tax season, but also that it afforded me another opportunity to extol the virtues of Robert Benchley.

Daily readers of this blog know that I quote frequently from this legendary wit from the Algonquin Round Table. But in prior cases, I quoted from among the 600 of his essays eventually collected into 12 volumes.

This short gave me the chance to allude to—and comment on—some of the work he did in Hollywood.

Towards the end of his life, Benchley’s already considerable drinking intensified over his belief that he had forsaken reasonably creative outlets such as his reviewing at The New Yorker and a radio show for more remunerative work in Tinseltown as a supporting player in full-length films and a star in his own shorts of less than 10 minutes.

A few weeks before his death, his physical and mental health had deteriorated so much that he stopped writing altogether.

The Hollywood work that Benchley regarded with such loathing consisted of 48 short “how-to” videos. One, “How to Sleep,” won Best Short Subject at the 1935 Academy Awards. I don’t know the particular conditions under which he made them, but they can still provide laughs for anyone in need of one—and who doesn’t?

Some contemporary readers on Amazon, commenting on one of Benchley’s books, have been known to write that they are “dated.” This strikes me as an essentially meaningless complaint. The same could be said of almost any work not released in the present moment.

If you want a better evaluation of his work, remember this: Four of the leading humor columnists in the last half-century—Russell Baker, Art Buchwald, Erma Bombeck, and Dave Barry—looked to Benchley for inspiration, according to Neil Grauer's wonderful 1986 appreciation of the humorist in American Heritage Magazine.

“How refreshing to read a biography of a humorist who was not, in real life, a son of a bitch,” wrote another great humor writer, Christopher Buckley, in commenting on Billy Altman’s 1997 book, Laughter’s Gentle Soul: The Life of Robert Benchley. “The worst that could be said of Robert Benchley was that he was a bit of a bounder to his wife, an absentee father to his sons, and ultimately a disappointment to himself. But for all that, his wife and sons were devoted to him, as he in his way was to them. His friends, who were legion, adored him. As he lay in the hospital, hemorrhaging to death from cirrhosis, forty people showed up to volunteer to give blood. How many writers could make that posthumous boast?”

(For a fine look at Benchley that focuses on his film work, see Stephen Mears' 2017 "TCM Diary" blog post for Film Comment Magazine.)