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Looking for some quality comedy entertainment to check out?
Who better to turn to for under-the-radar comedy recommendations than comedians?
The Algonquin Round Table is not underrated.
Some of its stars have burned brighter for longer, however.
Dorothy Parker is the inspiration for films, books, and cocktail napkins to this very day.
Her formerVanity Fairco-worker,Robert Benchley, has faded from comedy memory.
Benchley wrote dozens of comic essays in which he wrote prodigiously about absolutely nothing.
Later, he made comedy shorts, including the Academy AwardwinningHow to Sleepin 1935.
When readers wrote in trying to correct him, Benchleysaid this: I am sticking to my guns …
There is no such place as Budapest.
Perhaps you are thinking of Bucharest, and there is no such place as Bucharest either.
Benchley hoarded kitschy objects he thought were funny.
Vulture spoke to Markoe about Mr. Benchley, emojis, and the mothers who birth comedians.
For some reason, I need the cerebral underpinning to make the silliness work for me.
So he does both of those things really, really well.
He sort of cuts through time in that way.
Especially literary figures; they can seem really intimidating and terrifying.
I hadnt ever looked athis Wikipedia page, and I realized that Benchley and I had something in common.
Because it was literally my own mom, as well.
The same pop in.
His brother was killed in the Spanish-American War and was apparently a wonderful, lauded hero.
]Which made me laugh out loud!
Everybody in comedy has a mom like this.
They are breeding the comedians of the world, these moms.
Why is that?I dont know why that is.
But I dont understand popular opinion.
Ive always been puzzled by it.
But shes more difficult.
So hes gonna fill as much time as possible with parenthetical clauses.
Thats something I was really struck by,reading his essays.
He took a short sentence and made it into a paragraph.
The films are a little more evolved than that because youve got a film crew.
Hes got a great one explaining the causes of the Great Depression.
Its kind of like the stuff were hearing about COVID now.
I feel that you should put them in when you’re able to, but theyre going away.
I will go to my grave never having used one.
I didnt know that.
Because he did theHarvard Lampoonin college; he started pretty young.
He never would have written the Great Novel, that guy!
He was really good at what he did.
And he didnt live very long.
He was dead in 1945.
I think he had cirrhosis.
Why do you think it is that some comedians underrate comedy?Do they?
I know a great many comedians are filled with self-hatred.
And that, I think, is something they should look into.
I think its a big waste of time, that self-hatred.
But its really common.
You have to keep coming up with segments and segments and segments.
I decided to sit down and read them as though they are an early work by an author.
So I started to realize I only remembered about a third of what Id written in them.
I didnt seem like me to me.
It was me before I was compulsively jokey.
Benchley hoarded everything he thought might be funny, too.Yeah.
Theyll enjoy it.And I remember kids in my class going, We have to read for this class?
I thought,Wow, that nailed it.Thats exactly the way it is for writing, certainly.
I felt so personally implicated by that essay.Its a very astute, funny piece that everyone likes.
Except the people in my art class, who probably didnt read it.
Thats why I didnt go on to teach another year.
Its obvious he knows nothing about a polyp.
And hes full of embarrassment that he has to talk about sex life at all.
And that is equally attracted to the opposite sex polyp, a button, and a crumb of cornbread.
Finds the three equally sexually intriguing.
And I, for one, would not have it otherwise.
Which is a nice way of saying absolutely nothing.
Nobody says nothing like this guy.
Dave quickly got fed up with that.
One was How to Ride in a Cab, and we did it in a cab.
One was How to Do Your Laundry, and we did it at a laundromat.
I used to do pieces like that forNot Necessarily the Newsat one point.
They were my favorite thing to do.
Theres a couple of little spots of animation.
And then theres a sheep pileup.Yeah.
So he was kind of mixed media there too.
But he was rewarded for that one.
An Academy Award, my God.
That one is harsher in hindsight because hes so mean to alcoholics in it.
And hes dead from alcoholism not long after that.Yeah.
Went to join his brother, made his mother happy.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
