Of All Things (Version 2)

Robert C. Benchley was America's greatest actor in the theater of the mundane, and this collection captures him at his finest. Here he tackles the small disasters of daily existence with the gravity of a Shakespearean tragic hero: the impossibility of doing absolutely nothing, the psychological warfare of returning a library book late, the existential dread of being asked to summarize a book at a dinner party. His narrator is a man perpetually overwhelmed by life, a gentleman scholar who approaches trivial matters with devastating academic rigor. The humor emerges not from jokes but from the collision between the triviality of what he's describing and the deadly seriousness with which he describes it. These are essays that pretend to be important documents about nothing, and in doing so, reveal everything absurd about how we live. Benchley's influence ripples through every modern humorist who ever pretended to be stupider than they are.