Love Conquers All

Robert Benchley wrote about life's smallest humiliations with the gravity of a war correspondent, and somehow that made them funnier. Originally published in 1922, this collection gathers sixty-three essays and reviews from a man who could make the experience of ordering dinner or waiting for a train feel like existential theater. Benchley was an original Algonquin Round Table wit, and his influence ripples forward through Thurber, Woody Allen, and every writer who's ever tried to make the ordinary feel absurd. The targets here remain startlingly familiar: the tyranny of social obligations, the terror of appearing stupid in public, the way time slows when you're trapped in a boring conversation. His method never varies. He treats every minor inconvenience as if it were a matter of life and death, and the results are devastatingly funny. This is the kind of humor that doesn't age because human nature hasn't changed. We're all still the same idiots panicking about what to wear to a party or pretending to understand something we don't. Benchley just said it first, and he said it better.