The Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor - You Could Win!
Here's the scoop on "The Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor."
Robert Benchley is one of the seminal American humorists. He found fame during the 1920s, writing columns for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and found even more fame, when, he and his pal, Dorothy Parker formed a lunch group still known today as The Algonquin Round Table. They set the tempo for humor world wide in the 1920s.
Robert Benchley is still recognized today as an inspiration by humorists like, Dave Barry, Bob Newhart, Erma Bombeck, Woody Allen, Shelly Berman and almost everyone else.
When Bob Newhart won the Mark Twain Prize for Humor early in 2005, at the Kennedy Center, most of the speakers (including Newhart himself) named Robert Benchley as an inspiration.
Benchley's son, Nathaniel Benchley, wrote the novel, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, which became a William Rose screen play and comedy blockbuster movie in 1966. Benchley's grandson, Peter Benchley, wrote Jaws.
My life-long love affair with the work of Robert Benchley began when I was eight, playing hooky from school. I'd been exploring the attic, and found an old red-cover hard-bound book with one corner gnawed off.
The missing corner didn't surprise me. I had two older brothers.
I'm not sure why, but I took the book with me, and standing at the foot of the stairs, I began reading it. I couldn't put it down. Its title was My Ten years in a Quandary, and it was filled with humor columns by Robert Benchley. I didn't know there were books like that. It was the first "real book" I read. I knew on that day, standing in my bedroom, that I wanted to be a humor columnist when I grew up.
Thirty-eight years later, and after several serious career detours, the dream is coming true for me, and it all started with a short article I mailed, one fine day in late winter, to the Robert Benchley Society.
I sent in one piece, and promptly forgot about it.
Then, last May, I started getting a number of e-mails saying "Congratulations!" in the subject line. I thought it might be a virus, or an ad for Viagra, so I deleted them. Then I got one from a writer friend, Ed Tasca. I knew who Ed was, so I opened his e-mail. That's how I learned I'd won.
If you write humor, you should submit your finest work (in the style of Robert Benchley) to the Robert Benchley Society. http://www.robertbenchley.org/.
You might be the next winner.
Over Labor Day, my editor, Sue Piper, a writer, Jean Bruner and my pal, Dwain Buck, went back to Boston to get the award. It was a weekend of activities, tours, a boat trip, the race track, banquets (they let me read my winning entry) . . . Saturday night, after the bars closed, found a group of us men in tuxedos women in evening gowns, out in street front of Paul Revere's house. Heck, I knew Paul Revere. My band played on his TV show back in 1969. I even knew Mark Lindsey. But I couldn't get anyone to open the door. So we all quit making noise and went back to our hotels. It turns out there were two Paul Reveres.
-- Horace J. Digby --
2005 Winner of the Robert Benchley Award for Humor
Robert Benchley is one of the seminal American humorists. He found fame during the 1920s, writing columns for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and found even more fame, when, he and his pal, Dorothy Parker formed a lunch group still known today as The Algonquin Round Table. They set the tempo for humor world wide in the 1920s.
Robert Benchley is still recognized today as an inspiration by humorists like, Dave Barry, Bob Newhart, Erma Bombeck, Woody Allen, Shelly Berman and almost everyone else.
When Bob Newhart won the Mark Twain Prize for Humor early in 2005, at the Kennedy Center, most of the speakers (including Newhart himself) named Robert Benchley as an inspiration.
Benchley's son, Nathaniel Benchley, wrote the novel, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, which became a William Rose screen play and comedy blockbuster movie in 1966. Benchley's grandson, Peter Benchley, wrote Jaws.
My life-long love affair with the work of Robert Benchley began when I was eight, playing hooky from school. I'd been exploring the attic, and found an old red-cover hard-bound book with one corner gnawed off.
The missing corner didn't surprise me. I had two older brothers.
I'm not sure why, but I took the book with me, and standing at the foot of the stairs, I began reading it. I couldn't put it down. Its title was My Ten years in a Quandary, and it was filled with humor columns by Robert Benchley. I didn't know there were books like that. It was the first "real book" I read. I knew on that day, standing in my bedroom, that I wanted to be a humor columnist when I grew up.
Thirty-eight years later, and after several serious career detours, the dream is coming true for me, and it all started with a short article I mailed, one fine day in late winter, to the Robert Benchley Society.
I sent in one piece, and promptly forgot about it.
Then, last May, I started getting a number of e-mails saying "Congratulations!" in the subject line. I thought it might be a virus, or an ad for Viagra, so I deleted them. Then I got one from a writer friend, Ed Tasca. I knew who Ed was, so I opened his e-mail. That's how I learned I'd won.
If you write humor, you should submit your finest work (in the style of Robert Benchley) to the Robert Benchley Society. http://www.robertbenchley.org/.
You might be the next winner.
Over Labor Day, my editor, Sue Piper, a writer, Jean Bruner and my pal, Dwain Buck, went back to Boston to get the award. It was a weekend of activities, tours, a boat trip, the race track, banquets (they let me read my winning entry) . . . Saturday night, after the bars closed, found a group of us men in tuxedos women in evening gowns, out in street front of Paul Revere's house. Heck, I knew Paul Revere. My band played on his TV show back in 1969. I even knew Mark Lindsey. But I couldn't get anyone to open the door. So we all quit making noise and went back to our hotels. It turns out there were two Paul Reveres.
-- Horace J. Digby --
2005 Winner of the Robert Benchley Award for Humor
posted by Horace J. Digby | 1:41 AM
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