Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker ‘In Broadway Playhouses’: Middlebrow Theatricality and Sophisticated Humour

Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker‘In Broadway Playhouses’: Middlebrow

Theatricality and Sophisticated Humour

Catherine Keyser

‘In fact, the theatre would be much better off if everyone, with theexception of me and a few of my friends, stayed at home. And even thenI should like to go alone once in a while’.

– Robert Benchley, ‘Shaw on Over-Enthusiastic Audiences’ (Life,23 December 1920)

‘The actors play the partsOf Light, Joy, Beauty, and Imagination,While the audience represent Ennui and Bewilderment’.

– Dorothy Parker, ‘Hymn of Hate: The Drama’ (Life, 5 May 1921)

On 30 April 1922, a discombobulated businessman took his placeon stage at the Shuberts’ Forty-ninth Street Theatre. This bumblerand his repetitious and absurd ‘Treasurer’s Report’ stole the show.1

The performer spoofing the infelicity of corporate language waspopular magazine writer Robert Benchley. After this debut in theAlgonquin Round Table’s send-up of popular revue Chauve Souris(with the punningly American title ‘No, Sirree!’), Benchley became afeatured monologist in Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue and later afamiliar presence in Hollywood shorts. In this monologue, Benchleyturned the tedium of bureaucratic monotony and the vitiation ofcorporate language into the medium of the sophisticated humorist.For No, Sirree!, Dorothy Parker wrote lyrics for ‘The Everlastin’Ingenue Blues’, a song in which infantilised chorus girls lamented

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their limited professional opportunities: ‘We are little flappers, nevergrowing up/And we’ve all of us been flapping since Belasco was apup’. Broadway starlets spout sloppy slang and canned sentimentrather than declaim Shakespearean verse: ‘We’d like to take a crackat playing Lady Macbeth/But we’ll whisper girlish nothings with ourdying breath’.2 In both of these parodies, Benchley and Parker elevatetheir eloquence and wit over the inarticulacy of the roles they seem – byvirtue of sex and class – destined to fill. Benchley refuses bureaucraticobsolescence, while Parker resists flapper insouciance.

Both comic roles, the businessman and the flapper, reflect themodern expansion of business culture and the accompanying fantasyof social mobility for the middle classes.3 By parodying the speechassociated with these roles, Benchley and Parker investigate theperformances that constitute middle-class professionalism. Broadwaywas a space that was symbolically and literally in a class transitionin the early twentieth century. Drawing upon the low cultural legacyof burlesque, minstrel shows, and vaudeville, producers like FlorenzZiegfeld and the Shubert brothers produced respectable attractions onBroadway: melodramas, comedies, operettas, and musical revues.4 Thetransformation of the theatre district at the turn of the century reflectsthis shifting cultural classification. What in the nineteenth century hadbeen the seedy Tenderloin District and Longacre Square became thetwentieth century’s Broadway and Times Square. These spaces, bothMidtown and the theatres themselves, became symbols of middle-classconsumer entertainment.

A 1926 newspaper article defining ‘the middlebrow’ linked thisfigure’s tastes to the success or failure of Broadway productions: ‘Oneor twice a season a theatrical manager gives him what he wants andthe ticket speculators do a thriving business for a year or so afterward’.Because the middlebrow consumer’s ‘claim to his title is not basedon education nor heredity’, the public performance of taste played acrucial role in cultural self-definition.5 In an October 1917 Vanity Fairarticle, Benchley observed that the social ritual of attending the theatreturned spectators into performers, granting them ‘the privilege ofbeing seen going in and coming out’.6 Many Broadway plays featuredwhat theatre historian Ronald Wainscott deems ‘a commercial, upscaleethic’, as producers and playwrights deliberately featured sophisticatedcharacters they imagined their audience ‘would like to know’.7 Theappeal of tonal sophistication spanned multiple class fractions, unitedin their desire for cultural distinction but divided in profession,income, and perspective.8

Recent critical work by theatre scholars Amy Koritz and DavidSavran on the centrality of middlebrow identity and dilemmas to the

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Broadway theatre in the 1920s provides a fruitful model for the literarycritic seeking to provide a nuanced account of modern middlebrowwriters who saw but little divide between the stage and page. AsAnn Douglas observes: ‘This was the most theatrical generation inAmerican annals’.9 Both Benchley and Parker began their writingcareers as drama critics and humorists at Vanity Fair, a magazinethat espoused an ethos of sophistication, mixed high and low culturein its contents, and prominently featured Broadway celebrities andproductions. Benchley’s stage and print monologues and Parker’smagazine monologues and light verse resemble stage comedy andsong lyrics more than stream-of-consciousness prose or imagisticpoetry. Their work provides insight into forms of social performanceconnected with modernity (from publicity and celebrity to urbananonymity and cocktail party chatter) as they featured personalitythrough monologue and recombined cultural tiers through wit.

The first section of this essay documents the intersection ofmiddlebrow print and theatre cultures in modern New York andestablishes the ideal of sophistication presented in the Broadway playsof the 1920s and 1930s. The second section assesses the dual role ofdrama critic as professional and personality, two roles promoted bythe modern emergence of middlebrow culture. Privileging personaltaste over institutional approbation, Benchley and Parker bothmock experimental abstruseness and encourage subjective intimacybetween audience response and dramatic artifice. They recognise thatmodernist experimentation is beginning to play a social role in thetheatre as an emblem of intellectual elites, and they lament the criticalerasure of mass cultural influence that ensues once that stratificationoccurs. At the same time, Benchley and Parker suggest that modernistthemes appeal to the internal experience of alienated urbanites andshould be legible and even personal to middlebrow audiences.

The essay then shifts its focus from middlebrow culturalinstitutions to middlebrow literary innovations, addressing in sectionsthree and four respectively the performance of self and the suspicionof domestic normativity in sophisticated humour. These final sectionsshould begin to demonstrate that the middlebrow emphasis onperformance – an over-determined trope of class transition andconsumer individualism – also facilitated parody, register mixing, andthe celebration of urban autonomy. Benchley and Parker implicitlyasked their readers to be sceptical about the forms of modernworking life, inventive in their cultural tastes and appropriations, andunabashed about the choice to pursue pleasure and publicity, evenoutside previously accepted models of self and community. Indeed,these messages of sophisticated humour coincided with some of the

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typical themes of modernism, though their patter resembled ColePorter more than Gertrude Stein.

‘You’re the Top’: Broadway Sophistication andMiddlebrow Culture

The influence of the drama – and the interpenetration of theatre,publicity, and print culture – can be seen everywhere in modernmiddlebrow literature of urban sophistication.10 Performing theself – whether on stage or in the pages of a magazine – was a greatenterprise of middlebrow cultural producers, and in turn, they offeredreaders an entrée to multiple forms of culture so that they too couldchoose a role of their own. The Algonquin Round Table was inmany ways defined by its association with Broadway: its geographicalproximity to the theatre district; its professional affiliations(playwrights Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, RobertSherwood; drama critics Benchley, Heywood Broun, Parker, andAlexander Woollcott), and its loud-mouth virtuosity – linguistic andsocial experimentation writ large across the pages of the papers.11

The Round Tablers were experts in publicity. Franklin PierceAdams’ popular newspaper column, ‘The Conning Tower’, recordedtheir exploits and published their light verse. These press andtheatre professionals treated private life as a type of theatreand professional life as transformable by ‘play’, whether wordplay,horseplay, or performance. While some studied at Harvard (Benchleyand Broun), others defined their reputation purely through attitudeand aptitude (Parker and Harold Ross). The Round Table’s privilegingof improvisation over pedigree suggested that all that was required forsuccess in the urban sphere was a quick wit and a sharp tongue – inshort, that a good performance could get you anywhere.

The mythos of Manhattan communicated this promise of socialmobility and self-invention. The intermingling of urban life made itharder to keep the highbrow and the lowbrow apart – both in termsof entertainments and audiences. In Parker’s 1928 essay ‘My HomeTown’, she writes: ‘I see [New York] at night, with the low skies red withthe back-flung lights of Broadway, those lights of which Chesterton – orthey told me it was Chesterton – said, “What a marvellous sight forthose who cannot read!’’ ’ Parker seems to mock lowbrow illiteracy,but she also exposes herself as a middlebrow cultural consumer. Sheknows Chesterton not because of her highbrow education but becausehis epigrams circulate in her social sphere. By claiming New York as

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her home town, she claims allegiance with ‘those who cannot read’,even as she appears to disparage them. Their excitement at the lightsof Broadway is her excitement; the performance of class and culturalidentity turns the city itself into a theatre: ‘There is excitement everrunning [New York’s] streets. Each day, as you go out, you feel the littlenervous quiver that is yours when you sit in a theatre just before thecurtain rises. Other places may give you a sweet and soothing sense oflevel; but in New York there is always the feeling of “Something’s goingto happen’’ ’. In modern urban spaces, middle-class identity is not the‘sweet and soothing sense of level’ but rather an opportunity to be atonce audience member – observing the motley array of persons aroundyou in the cityscape – and also actor on the brink of a life-transformingperformance.12

Parker was not the only one to think of New York as a stagewhere an individual actor might break into a higher caste. As Wainscottobserves, ‘the playwrights were creating characters who talked, moved,and behaved in the sophisticated and glamorous manner that they andtheir audiences would like to think they themselves did’.13 Benchleyadmitted that attending a Shaw play made him feel ‘as if I werestanding with a gardenia in my buttonhole and a cup of tea in myhand, saying something enormously witty and cynical to the Countessof Deerfoot’. A mere middle-class audience member could obtainthis feeling for the price of admission: ‘Perhaps that is why I enjoyShaw so much, and why I could sit through “Heartbreak House’’ allover again, even the second act and the explosions’.14 Sophisticationshone on the Broadway stage as an ideal of social and culturalattainment untarnished by the stigma of upper-class culture imaginedas ‘mechanical conformity’ and ‘empty convention’.15 It served as aposture available to white people with taste and wit, no matter theirclass background or education.16

On one level, the middlebrow sophisticated mode was a vigilantand suspicious one – looking for signs of pretension while defendingits own claim to legitimacy. In a 1918 Vanity Fair column, for example,Parker warned readers to be on the lookout for ‘Glossies’, a multiplyingdemographic that has ‘honeycombed the nation like the German spysystem’, people who were ‘more refined that is really necessary’. Likethe middlebrow consumer, the glossies ‘belong at neither extremeof society’. According to Parker, the Glossies betray themselves withexcess: ‘their manners, morals, speech, shoes, and finger-nails are alla little too polished’.17 Thus, even the appearance of sophisticationcould reveal a gauche desire for that status. Through this parody ofexcessive gentility, Parker promotes her own honesty and authenticity

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next to the pretence and artificiality of others. The Glossies ‘willnever drop into the low patois of mere ordinary people’, but Parkerpunctuates her theatre reviews with blunt judgements like ‘ “The HouseBeautiful’’ is, for me, the play lousy’.18

Indeed, the sophisticated mode delights in register mixing,which reflects the ‘blurring of high and popular culture as separatetaste levels’ in the modern period.19 When Cole Porter writes‘You’re the Top’ for the musical Anything Goes in 1934, he definessophistication through a mix of cultural and commercial allusions. Hisgleeful catalogue of museums, artworks, celebrities, and commoditiesgenerates what Janice Radway calls ‘the scandal of the middlebrow’:‘literary and cultural mixing whereby forms and values associatedwith one form of cultural production were wed to those usuallyassociated with another’.20 By defining ‘the top’ as simultaneously‘the National Gall’ry’, ‘Garbo’s sal’ry’, and ‘cellophane’, Porter’s lyricsconcoct ‘the promiscuous mixture of commerce and art, entertainmentand politics, the banal and the auratic, profane and sacred, spectacularand personal, erotic and intellectual’ that Savran explains (with apun) is traditionally ‘branded as middlebrow.21 The delicious orality ofimaginative rhymes and the inventive combination of cultural allusionsmake Porter’s sophistication a posture of play as well as grandeur,defiance as well as distinction.

The theatricality and playfulness of middlebrow artists, theiropenness to creative combinations of cultural tiers, might not haveseemed as surprising in the 1920s as it would come to in subsequentdecades.22 In his 1915 essay ‘ “Highbrow’’ and “Lowbrow’’ ’, Van WyckBrooks decried ‘desiccated culture at one end’ (highbrow) and ‘starkutility’ (lowbrow) at the other and proposes a ‘middle’ that would ex-press ‘a popular life that bubbles with energy and spreads and grows’.Brooks encouraged register mixing, ‘for slang has quite as much instore for culture as culture has for slang’.23 In his influential 1924 cele-bration of The Seven Lively Arts – arts that included comic strips, musicalrevues, and jazz – cultural critic Gilbert Seldes, who had also servedas editor of modernist little magazine The Dial, defended the culturalimportance of the middlebrow columnist: ‘The most sophisticated ofthe minor arts in America is that of the colyumist [sic]’. Seldes praisedcolumnist Franklin Pierce Adams because he served as ‘a gadfly to theexceptionally sluggish beast – the New York intellectual’ and hence‘a patron saint to the smart’.24 In the cultural picture painted by VanWyck and Seldes, the highbrow inhabited an ivory tower of culturallycomplacent self-regard, while the middlebrow, however irreverent oreven irritating, lived immersed in the city streets of cultural change.

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Seldes argued that a full appreciation of modern culture requiredpleasure in art from a variety of tiers: ‘beside the great arts there isa certain number of lesser arts which have also a pleasure to give;and if we savour it strongly and honestly we shall lose none of ourdelight in the others’.25 Parker incorporated Broadway’s delights intoher work; it is a small step from the jangling word play of Tin PanAlley songs to the robust rhymes of Parker’s light verse, from thesuggestive and bitter love songs of Cole Porter to Parker’s poetry ofromantic disappointment. In her drama reviews, she monitors theinventiveness and plausibility of Broadway lyrics with the attentivenessof a fellow professional: ‘if [Irving Berlin’s] music shows no flashesof originality, the same cannot be said of his lyrics. It takes trueinspiration to rhyme “sarsaparilla’’ with “Rockefeller’’; it requires realingenuity to rhyme “intricate’’ and “little bit’’.’26 Though she mocksBerlin’s pyrotechnics, Parker performs equally unlikely feats of rhyme,meter, and free association in her verse. In a ‘Valentine’ to sex farceplaywright Avery Hopwood, Parker exclaims, ‘How you must haveloved, when small/Chalking words upon a wall!’ and then concludesthat his voluptuous comedies reflect commercial rather than libidinousdesires: ‘Ever heavier grows your purse/As you go from bed to worse’.27

Sharp observations about contemporary culture come cloaked in bothgenres (comic song lyrics and light verse) in a deceptively childlikeguise, like Little Red Riding Hood hiding a knife from the Big BadWolf.

While Porter informs us in another song lyric that ‘Missus DorothyParker has the country’s wittiest brain’, it often seems in sophisticatedhumour of this period that it is not the superlative status that mattersas much as the fun that it takes to get there.28 The plays of NoëlCoward, for example, feature characters enjoying a bantering lifeof leisure. While their beautiful apartments and disposable incomesuggest privilege, they use this privilege to defy received notions ofmarriage and sexuality.29 Benchley observes in his review: ‘Mr. NoëlCoward’s design for living, as set forth in his play of that name, is anextremely freehand drawing of delightful line and aspect, regardless ofits practicability as a blueprint. (And who is to say whether it is practicalor not?)’30 Coward’s sophisticated aesthetic chooses freedom, delight,and aesthetics over prescription, obligation, and social engineering.The question mark in Benchley’s review leaves all erotic possibilitiesopen.

Thus, sophisticated humour employs the rhetoric of culturalsnobbery associated with the hierarchies of the modern period, butit also mobilises queer aesthetics and flapper brashness.31 Benchley

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and Parker are both ‘safe’ practitioners of sophisticated humourbecause of their domestic credentials as a suburban husband and alovelorn divorcée. However, as Faye Hammill suggests, the posture ofsophistication ‘allow[s] women access to conventionally male realmsand roles but also accommodat[es] men who do not conform totraditional models of manhood’.32 As I will discuss later in thisessay, Benchley sometimes manifested unease with the queerness ofsophistication and theatricality. The ambivalence that both Benchleyand Parker display about class identity and social mobility may reflecttheir relatively closeted espousal of sophisticated aesthetics. They bothclaim office worker boredom instead of spectacular excess, domesticdrudgery rather than erotic triumphs.

The middlebrow comedies of the Broadway theatre placedsimilar checks upon potentially subversive forms of sexuality andidentity, not to mention the scandalous register mixing of themiddlebrow. The Broadway stage simultaneously supplied intoxicatingsensuality through its spectacles and reasserted social normsthrough its narratives.33 The flapper was one such problematicfigure – symbolising modernity but defying feminine gentility. RachelCrothers’ flapper comedies solved her heroines’ plights with marriage;even flappers, Crothers implies, are Nice People (1921). WhenAlgonquin Round Tablers George S. Kaufman and Marc Connellydepicted the modern woman and the professions in their Broadwaycomedies, she first ineptly and adorably interfered in her husband’sbusiness world in Dulcy (1920) and then managed it discretely fromthe sidelines in To the Ladies (1922). Both conceits acknowledgewomen’s new presence and influence in the professions but manage thebold implications of that entrance through the regulating institutionof marriage. Kaufman and Connelly also limit either the modernwoman’s facility with or access to language, as Dulcy (from the playthat bears her name) ‘has a way of speaking an age-old platitude as if it werea wise and original thought’, while faithful wife Elsie in To the Ladies restsin ‘quiet dignity’.34

Even the vexed contest between commercialism and artistry thatcharacterised middlebrow culture could be resolved by a symbolicmarriage, as in Crothers’ Expressing Willie (1924). Toothbrush manu-facturer Willie expresses the desire for distinction presumably sharedby many middle-class audience members: ‘I want what money can’tbuy. I want something that holds itself high’, but his faithful loveMinnie reminds him not to give in to an ersatz highbrow sensibility:‘You’re a sham now, Willie’.35 Domestic bliss between this pair commu-nicates the rather uneasy moral that ‘something that holds itself high’

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actually can be bought with money; Willie promises that his wife canbe a famous musician and that he will pay for her advertising. Themarriage of art and commerce becomes socially acceptable under theguise of domesticity and paternalism.

The excess and performance associated with celebrities andcolumnists could also be absorbed into a domestic mode. In Kaufman’sBroadway comedies, a dynasty of Broadway stars could turn out tobe a loving, if larger-than-life, family (The Royal Family [1927]), orthe nationally-admired wit could become just one of the family whenconfined to the home (The Man Who Came To Dinner [1939]). Coward’scomedies proposed that cosmopolitanism and sexual excitement werejust around the corner, even in the ho-hum bourgeois context of loveand marriage, but these daring qualities donned the distinguishedguise of a dapper Englishman in a dinner jacket (Private Lives [1930]and Design for Living, [1933]).

Each of these middlebrow Broadway comedy genres (flapperromance, domestic farce, drawing room comedy) shares three charac-teristics: a focus on the modern woman and her new role in public life,sophisticated banter as a sign of belonging and worthiness, and a back-drop of affluent lifestyles and middle-class individualism. The fact thatthis list of popular sophisticated playwrights between the wars includesfemale, Jewish, and gay writers suggests the tactical role that humourand performance played in the competing endeavours of assimilationand self-assertion. Parker specifically eschewed identification withthe adorable brainlessness and infantilised wifeliness that Dulcyrepresented. In a 1921 poem in Life magazine, Parker wryly thanks theheroine of Kaufman and Hart’s popular comedy for her ineloquence:

Dulcy, take our gratitude,All your words are golden ones.

Mistress of the platitude,Queen of all the old ones . . .

Heroines we’ve known, to date,Scattered scintillations

(Courtesy the Wilde estate)Through their conversations

Polished line and sparkling jest –They’ve provided plenty.

Dulcy’s bromides brought us rest –Dulcy far niente.36 (lines 1–3, lines 9–16)

Parker aligns herself with the sophistication of Wilde and his ‘scatteredscintillations’, alluding to her own reputation for the ‘polished line

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and sparkling jest’. Indirectly, she chastises Kaufman and Connellyfor relying on the stereotype of feminine inarticulacy. Parker creates aconspiracy between the modern woman and the sophisticated dandy.Their scintillations challenge the restfulness of clichéd speech andnormative roles.

Kaufman ultimately countered Parker’s endorsement of thesophisticated modern woman by turning her wry divorcee persona intoa maudlin stereotype. Kaufman and Moses Hart fictionalised Parkerin Merrily We Roll Along (1934) as Julia, a bitter drunken woman whoenvies her friend, a successful male playwright of a ‘sophisticatedcomedy’. Julia echoes a famous Parker quip in answer to a bartender’squery: ‘Know what I’m having? . . . Not much fun’. The other charactersrespond as though her wit is manufactured, self-serving, and pathetic.In a toast, Julia articulates her own abjection: ‘To Richard Niles!Our most fashionable playwright! The man who has everything! AndI’d rather be what I am – a drunken whore!’37 Kaufman and Hartconnect Julia’s wit with an imputation of sexual deviance that JosephLitvak suggests is often connected with popular condemnations ofsophistication.38 This painful burlesque of Parker’s public personareveals more than tensions within the Algonquin group; it suggests thecontroversy generated by an independent woman taking pleasure inpublicity and verbal play. Parker threatens to take away sophisticationfrom ‘The man who has everything!’, and her sense of humour iscoded as overindulgence in everything, from words to intoxicantsto sex. The vehemence of the rebuke in Julia’s characterisationreveals the disruptive power of the role Parker played in the publiceye.

Drama Criticism: Professionalism, Personality, andCultural Hierarchy

For Benchley and Parker, the theatre provided professionalopportunity, cultural sanctuary, and a tempting bull’s-eye. Benchleywrote a few scattered theatre reviews for Vanity Fair in the late 1910s,served as drama editor for Life from 1920 to 1929, and served astheatre reviewer for The New Yorker in the 1930s. In 1918, Parkerbecame ‘New York’s only woman drama critic’ when she took overthe theatre reviews at Vanity Fair from P.G. Wodehouse.39 After shewas fired in 1920 for the negativity of her reviews and for offendingproducer and Vanity Fair advertiser Florenz Ziegfeld with her pan ofhis wife Billie Burke, Parker moved on to write the Ainslee’s drama

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review column ‘In Broadway Playhouses’. In 1931, she substituted forBenchley in his theatre column for eight issues of The New Yorker,concluding her drama reviews with notes like ‘Robert Benchley, pleasecome home. Nothing is forgiven’.40

The drama critic’s role relied upon two related if distinctmodern ideals for the middle classes: personality and professionalism.Personality encompassed both the characteristics that made anindividual socially appealing and professionally successful and alsothe eccentricities that distinguished one from another within theconformity and anonymity of life en masse.41 Professionalism alsosuggested multiple domains, as the expansion of white-collar andclerical work elevated more urbanites to a professional class, while thisnew middle-class audience in turn sought the counsel of professionalsto guide them through the proliferating artefacts of middlebrowculture.42 Thus, two paradoxes were born. Personality connoted boththat which made the individual part of the group and that whichmade her stand out. Professionalism implied both that which madethe journalist like the businessman and that which distinguished himfrom the mere bureaucrat.

These contradictions undergirded the muddled status and self-positioning of the professional drama critic. Both Benchley and Parkerbegan their journalistic careers during the heyday of the Smart Setand the height of the cultural influence of its drama critic GeorgeJean Nathan. Nathan forged a curious relationship between dramacriticism and middlebrow cultural definition. On the one hand, hecherished cultural hierarchies, decrying commercialism in the theatreand the mixing of highbrow and lowbrow forms.43 On the other hand,he pioneered and defended theatre criticism based on personality andwit. In this way, Nathan appealed to a middlebrow audience wantingan expert guide to high culture, and he employed a mass-market tacticto peddle a highbrow sensibility.

In ‘ “Highbrow and Lowbrow’’ ’, Brooks lamented that ‘Betweenuniversity ethics and business ethics, between American cultureand American humour, between Good Government and Tammany,between academic pedantry and pavement slang, there is nocommunity, no genial middle ground’. He posited that thismiddle ground could be filled by personality: ‘where is personalityand all its works, if it is not essential somewhere, somehow,in some not very vague way, between?’44 Thus in spite ofhis hostility toward the middlebrow, Nathan’s critical postureprovided a model for personality-based criticism that facilitated theindividualised performance of taste. As Joan Shelley Rubin puts it

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in her consideration of Alexander Woollcott’s journalistic persona:‘Personality, which presumably existed for everyone in unlimitedsupply became, by itself, the sign of the cultured individual’.45

Both Benchley and Parker placed personality at the centre oftheir dramatic criticism. Their critical personae were alternativelyirritated and enthusiastic – ironic adolescents next to the grandioseand avuncular Woollcott who wrote theatre reviews for the NewYork Times. A sample of Woollcott’s prose suggests his typically self-satisfied tone: ‘A dull farce may become iridescent if you have beenluck enough to have had Chateauneuf du Pape with your dinner’.46

In contrast with Nathan the scolding connoisseur and Woollcottthe ingratiating concierge, Parker and Benchley acknowledge theirpersonal and hence variable attitudes as consumers of middlebrowculture.47 Indeed, foreswearing the seeming utility of his expertstatus, Benchley bemoans that readers ‘between the lines find a tacitassumption on our part that we expect them to follow our advice inthe matter of choosing plays’.48

Privileging the experiential over the experimental, Benchley andParker argue against some of the emergent aesthetics in the highbrowtheatre. For example, in a Life drama review, Benchley derides EugeneO’Neill’s lack of sophisticated self-awareness:

it does seem too bad that America’s greatest dramatist should be a manentirely devoid of humor. In wishing that Mr. O’Neill had a sense ofhumor we do not mean that we want him to write humorously or gagup his plays. Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor is not in thethings it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It isespecially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one withouta sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing whatis funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.49

As Henri Bergson might predict, a sense of humour correspondswith social anxiety and public embarrassment, but rather than viewthis vigilance as capitulation to constraining social norms, as mightBergson, Benchley casts it as responsiveness to the desire for pleasure,to the demands of the audience, to the rigours of aesthetic testingrather than the indulgence of programmatic gestures. In short, hesuggests that the modern artist can be and indeed should be ashowman.

In this review and others, Benchley calls on modern artists andmiddlebrow readers to be sophisticated; in other words, he championsthe ability to appreciate high art, the self-confidence to make fun of it,and the reflective ability to see oneself as others might. Thus, Benchley

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and Parker share with modernist experimenters the desire to attract asavvy, self-selecting audience. However, they consciously differentiatethemselves from these artists through the pragmatism and panacheof middlebrow sophistication. Modernist experimenters like O’Neillcould ‘be funny without knowing it’, while professionals like Benchleyand Parker would never lose sight of their commercial audience andtheir social situation. Like advertisers from the period, Benchley andParker expect that their readers will read (the world, their columns, thetheatre, themselves) with an ironic knowingness that these discourseshave rules and limitations. The ideal sophisticate will never be takenin. From this perspective, a major failure of avant-garde artists lies intheir belief in their own myth.

Benchley and Parker thus depict avant-garde artists, not at thecutting edge of modernity, but safely ensconced in their own aestheticphilosophies. This infatuation with experiment fails to connect withthe outside world and falters in the pursuit of professional excellence,according to Parker in a Vanity Fair drama review:

For all the interesting productions, the clever acting, and the undoubtedsincerity of the actors, there is always something a little bit precious aboutthese little theatres, and their little groups of players. In their care to holdthemselves aloof from commercialism, they seem to veer dangerouslyclose to amateurishness. I can’t help having the feeling that, after theperformance, we’re all to go into the parlor and have punch and chickensalad, and tell the boys and girls how becoming their costumes are, andhow awfully well they did in their parts – every bit as well as lots of thesereal, professional actors and actresses!50

Parker’s critique of the ‘little theatres’ privileges sophistication oversincerity and associates professionalism with public life and avant-gardism with private self-congratulation. As professionals poisedbetween art for art’s sake and humour for circulation’s sake, Benchleyand Parker proposed that a little pandering might not hurt great art,and it might even improve it.

While they encourage the avant-garde to be more professional,they treat the calling of a critic as an expression of primarily personaltaste.51 In a review in The New Yorker, Benchley admits his weaknessfor a favourite comic actor: ‘I overcame my personal displeasure atthe proceedings sufficiently to laugh right out loud, which placed mein an embarrassing position professionally as I really didn’t like theshow at all’.52 Benchley and Parker elevate individual taste over culturalinstitutions to prescribe appropriate responses. As Parker writes in onereview: ‘I went about quite brazenly saying I liked [this play], too, until

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I saw how up-stage the newspapers were about it, and then I subsidedinto a meek silence, fearing that I had betrayed my hideous ignorance.It’s a melodrama, of course, but then I don’t mind that, do you?’53 Byfeaturing personality in her reviews, Parker allows desire and pleasureto play a more prominent role in cultural experiences than a fear of‘hideous ignorance’.

Both Benchley and Parker approach high modernism from adecidedly irreverent standpoint. In ‘How to Understand Music’, forexample, Benchley deflates both the pedagogical promise of his essay’stitle and the cultural cachet of modernist innovations: ‘I must tellyou that the modern works of Schönberg, although considerablyincomprehensible to the normal ear (that is, an ear which adheresrather closely to the head and looks like an ear) are, in reality,quite significant to those who are on the inside. This includesSchönberg himself, his father, and a young man in whom he confideswhile dazed’.54 Benchley criticises the formal difficulty of modernistexperimentation as a form of social exclusion, ridicules critics whoextol Schönberg’s merits, and creates an insiders’ circle of middlebrowreaders who have listened to Schönberg.

Parker is similarly sceptical of modernist playwrights, enjoyingher familiarity with their bag of tricks but irked by the critical fawningthat follows in their wake. In a ‘Hymn of Hate: The Drama’ for VanityFair, Parker complains of ‘Plays That Make You Think’ that ‘cometo a rousing climax/in a nice, restful suicide, or a promising case ofinsanity’. (In a Vanity Fair review of Hedda Gabler, she admits that‘I invariably miss most of the lines in the last act of an Ibsen play;I always have my fingers in my ears, waiting for the loud report thatmeans that the heroine has just Passed On’.55) Symbolist drama seemsequally conventional to Parker in its combination of allusiveness andelusiveness:

And there is the Allegorical Drama;It becomes as sounding brass or a tinkling symbol.The critics can always find subtle shades of meaning in it, –The triumph of mind over Maeterlinck.56

In these humorous pieces, Parker reminds her reader that she willnot feign comfort during chaos (the gunshot in Gabler), nor will shestruggle to keep up with ‘the lofty-browed and the tortoise-shell-rimmed’ who pride themselves on their ‘dreamy-eyed appreciation’ ofmodernism. She sees these fans of abstraction and difficulty as anothertier of middlebrow consumers – ‘librarians’, ‘high-school teachers’, and‘drama leagues’ – one apt to take themselves seriously.57 By contrast,

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Parker the sophisticate admits that the highbrow drama ‘makes youthink that you should have gone to the movies’.58

These true confessions about the embarrassments of modernismcombine several key objections familiar to any contemporary teacherof modernism: namely, that modernism is depressing, overburdenedby symbols, designed for critics rather than consumers, its ambiguityavailable to nearly any interpretation. Today critics typically associateembarrassed responses to modernism with postmodern knowingness,but sophisticated middlebrow humour of the modern period viewedthe social life of modernism with reservations – as though themodernists were the eggheads at the party. Benchley and Parker implythat modernist innovators lack cultural sophistication thanks to theirsolipsism and that they attract similarly un-self-aware audiences whorespond more to their own ‘dreamy-eyed’ interpretations than to theworld around them.

But their concern is not simply that highbrow artists fail to keepup with public life. They also lambast the association of intellectualismand snobbery. The audience members at an Oscar Wilde comedy,Parker writes, ‘have a conscious exquisiteness, a deep appreciation oftheir own culture. They exude an atmosphere of the New Republic – asort of Crolier-than-thou air. ‘Look at us’, they seem to say. ‘We arethe cognoscenti. We have come because we can appreciate this – weare not as you, poor bonehead, who are here because you couldn’tget tickets for the Winter Garden’.59 Just as she implied that theexperiments of Ibsen and Maeterlinck conform to the conventions oftheir unconventional genres, Parker suggests that the intellectuals whoview themselves as superior to consumers are performing a kind ofcultural consumerism themselves.

The foregoing discussion should not suggest that Parker andBenchley refuse modernist innovation and eschew highbrow art – farfrom it. They instead adapt techniques of modern style to magazinevernacularism, promote certain models of modernism over others(Shaw is a favourite of both), and encourage their readers to beunembarrassed about catholic tastes that encompass both highbrowand lowbrow. Their humour placed cultural hierarchies in questionand provided their readers, in the words of Laura Frost, ‘the pleasureof cultural distinction and its undoing: a testimony to generalaudiences’ capacity to embrace the pleasures of innovation, andto ‘high brow’ audiences’ susceptibility to less cerebral pleasures’.60

In her review mocking the audience of An Ideal Husband, forexample, Parker emulates Wilde with her own wit (playing with thename of New Republic editor Herbert Croly) and deflates the false

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hierarchy of cognoscenti and boneheads. Parker implies that shethe reviewer – susceptible to the pleasures of both drawing roomcomedy and Ziegfeld musical revue – can easily traverse cultural tiers.Implicitly, this cultural mobility is available to the middlebrow readeras well.

By elevating personality over scholarly or avant-garde formsof expertise, Benchley and Parker open up the possibility of freshindividual engagement with challenging or inscrutable texts. In herreview of Tolstoy’s Redemption, Parker acknowledges that she too getsconfused: ‘Owing to the local Russian custom of calling each personsometimes by all of his names, sometimes by only his first three orfour, and sometimes by a nickname which has nothing to do with anyof the other names, it is difficult for one with my congenital lowness ofbrow to gather exactly whom they are talking about’. By claiming herown ‘congenital lowness of brow’, Parker promises that when she enjoysTolstoy, it is not because she feels like she ought to but rather becausethe production does not require expertise for appreciation. Parkeracknowledges, for example, that the abstraction of Robert EdmondJones’ scenery might distress an audience accustomed to realistic sets,so she teaches her readers how to interpret that minimalism as a nodto emotion and atmosphere, ‘suggestion rather than . . . painstakingdetail’. Finally, Parker evaluates the Tolstoy play in middlebrowterms:

It won’t fill you all full of glad thoughts, and it isn’t just the sort of thingto take the kiddies to, but won’t you please see it, even if you have tomortgage the Dodge, sublet the apartment, and sell everything but yourLiberty Bonds, to get tickets? Go and see it, so that you may come outand proclaim to the world that at last you have beheld a perfectly doneplay.

She mocks middle-class domesticity and middlebrow optimism,categories that threaten to make ‘you’ generic. Parker thus courtsthe sophisticated reader who wishes to stand for irony rather thanoptimism, culture rather than accumulation, personality rather thanpredictability. In her concluding appeal, Parker relinquishes hercritical authority. The audience member becomes the sophisticateddrama critic.61

At the end of her review, Parker makes the tongue-in-cheeksuggestion that the producers ‘translate Fedor Vasilyevich Protosov andSergei Dmitrievich Abreskov and Ivan Petrovich Alexandrov into Joeand Harry and Fred’.62 While this suggestion allows her to eschew theposture of intellectualism, it also implies that the personal experiences

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of Joes, Harrys, and Freds will grant them insight into the play. In aChekhov review, Benchley also makes an explicit connection betweenmiddle-class subjectivity and modern naturalism:

I love to be depressed by these Russians. As I go out into the street afteran evening in one of their high-ceilinged, mid-Romanoff houses wherea lot of people are stuck for the rest of their lives, I feel somehow that Ihave myself become an object of pity and that people ought to be a littlenicer to me from now on. I walk along the street with what seems to meto be rather sadly beautiful detachment, smiling wanly at the quips of mypleasure-mad companions, waiting for some sensitive Stranger to comeup and press my hand and murmur: ‘I understand, I understand’. Thisis a swell feeling.63

When ‘sadly beautiful detachment’ becomes ‘swell feeling’, Benchleytranslates the highbrow into the vernacular and enumerates thepleasures of identification offered by these plays (plays that may seemtoo serious for pleasure). He thus invites his reader to enjoy dramaticdifficulty without relinquishing personal taste.

Savran suggests that modern drama critics consolidated thetriumph of highbrow drama at the expense of vaudeville, jazz, andlow cultural hybrid forms. By defending the ‘legitimate theatre’ againstall its foes, critics like Nathan, Savran contends, recapitulated a rigidsense of cultural hierarchy.64 Benchley, by contrast, questioned thecanonisation of Eugene O’Neill because of its erasure of his cruciallow cultural influences:

Let us stop all this scowling talk about ‘the inevitability of the Greektragedy’ and ‘O’Neill’s masterly grasp of the eternal verities’ and let usadmit that the reason why we sat for six hours straining to hear eachline through the ten-watt acoustics of the Guild Theatre was because‘Mourning Becomes Electra’ is filled with good, old-fashioned, spine-curling melodrama. It is his precious inheritance from his trouper-father.

Middlebrow individualism allows Benchley to acknowledge the inflatedlength of the play: ‘I began to be cushion-conscious’. Benchley’s wittypersonality brings the curtain down on self-important critics whoignore the experiential side of the literary drama: ‘I began to realizethat, for me personally, “Mourning Becomes Electra’’ was getting to bejust about one hour too long. I know that this a purely individual andunworthy reaction, quite out of place in what should be a serious reviewof a great masterpiece, but, as this page is nothing if not personal, I amsetting it down’. This subjective taste allows Benchley to acknowledgeaffective pleasures denied to the self-consciously highbrow. Benchley

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compliments O’Neill in slangy, unapologetic style: ‘he does thrill thebejeezus out of us, just as his father used to, and that is what we go tothe theatre for’.65

Indeed, the elasticity of voice achieved by both Benchley andParker – the quick shift of attitudes from praise to wisecrack tocensure to self-deprecation within one theatre review – demonstratesa pragmatic approach to the cultural marketplace and validates thedesire for fun in the form of popular entertainments and theatricality,both literal and figurative. On the popular stage, a battle ragedover what Savran calls ‘two modernisms’: one a Europeanised modelof seriousness and sincerity, the other a slangy jazzy Americanvernacularism.66 Benchley and Parker praise the former in theirtheatre reviews, albeit with a touch of scepticism, but they perform thelatter. Complimenting Noël Cowards’ witticisms in a theatre review forThe New Yorker, Benchley highlights his own American informality: ‘It isall very discouraging to one who has a working vocabulary of eighteenwords, six of them being ‘swell’ and ‘lousy’.’67

The mirror-image of personality’s reign in the Parker andBenchley reviews is their emphasis on professional rigor. Theyinvoke professionalism to legitimate their journalistic authority andto establish their common ground with white-collar readers. Salaryseekers rather than hedonists, Benchley and Parker earn their play. Inone review, Parker calls herself ‘a tired business woman’.68 In ‘SportingLife in America: Dozing’, Benchley observes that ‘In my professionalcapacity as a play reviewer I have had occasion to experiment in thevarious ways of sitting up straight and still snatching a few winksof health-giving sleep’.69 Similarly, Parker assures her readers ‘Therereally isn’t much to say for the life of a critic. In the first place, it isentirely too spotty. There are long, quiet stretches when he hasn’t athing to do with his evenings, and then there are sudden outbursts ofsuch violent activity that he nearly succumbs to apoplexy’.70 They casttheir theatre-going as an alienating routine.

Indeed, professionalism often lies precisely in discomfort; whileothers are allowed to enjoy the entertainment, Parker and Benchleyhave to endure it. In a review of a Chekhov play, Benchley laments:

Perhaps some of my own confusion came from the fact that my seats atthe Martin Beck were so situated that an overhanging loge cut off most ofthe sound except that from Forty-fifth Street (into which my right leg waspractically protruding) and from the box office, or adjoining taxi-stand,where telephone calls and gay badinage were offering highly successfulcompetition to the metaphysical talk on the stage.71

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Benchley’s theatre seats are like an impractical desk at an office,an unfortunate configuration of furniture imposed upon ratherthan chosen by the employee. But because he can relate to theuncomfortable office worker, Benchley also serves as a medium,channelling the voices of highbrow drama (‘metaphysical talk on thestage’) and street talk (‘telephone calls and gay badinage’). Benchley’sown body is the conduit between these two cultural registers.

The intimacy of this relationship, the immersive threat of thecultural positioning between stage and street, art and metropolis,highbrow and lowbrow, requires some policing from the professionalcritic. Parker and Benchley dramatise their ambivalent relationshipto middlebrow culture in their depictions of spectators who cometo the theatre for amusement rather than for work. Both complainabout undiscerning and distractible audiences, disparaging those whocoughed, cried, or talked during the drama. Parker complains that ‘myimpression of Miss Barrymore’s Juliet is almost entirely a pictorial one.What little I could hear, between barrages of coughs, was charming’.72

Benchley reports ‘The audience was in one of its most bronchialmoods’ and suggest that ‘one of the best things that could happen tothe drama would be the abolition of audiences’.73 Their sophisticationis often established at the expense of unreflecting women, a typicalsymbol of the middlebrow threat to highbrow culture. Benchley writes,‘I once heard a woman laugh at that most tragic moment in all drama,the off-stage shot in The Wild Duck, and I afterward had her killed, sothere will be no more of that out of her’.74

Benchley and Parker use their caricatures of female spectatorsto separate their sophisticated aesthetic from the sentimentalism,sensuality, and pretension often aligned with the objectionablemiddlebrow consumer. In a catalogue of ‘Who’s Who in the Audience’,Parker lists the embarrassing responses of women at matinees: ‘promptand lavish tears if any one on stage mentions mother love’, a‘community chorus of “Ah’s’’ when little children are introducedinto the action of the drama’, and pride in ‘all that is clean andfine on our stage’. Equally objectionable are ‘Large, blonde, over-nourished women’ who ‘are able to discern a double meaning in linesthat even the author himself intended to have but a single one’.Highbrow entertainments draw spinsters: ‘Spectacled, unpowderedfemales, weary from their conscientious day’s work in museums orpublic libraries. Say they like to see only those plays which give themsome noble thought to take home with them’.75 Gentility, vulgarity, andintellectualism garner the scorn of the sophisticate. Benchley suggeststhat ‘Matinees should be left to the ladies, to giggle and cry and buzz

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to their hearts’ content. And then . . . the sophisticates and grown-upscan come in for the evening entertainment and the show can go on asintended’.76

In these accounts, Benchley and Parker rehearse the Great Divide,not only between highbrow modernists and lowbrow female audiences,but also between professional critics and amateur consumers. Ina Vanity Fair parody called ‘The Non-Professional Critics’, Parker’s‘Debutante’ provides a purely sartorial account of the show: ‘I hadthe best time – just cried my eyes out. She dies in the end, you know,in the loveliest white dress with little pearl beads all over it, and thesweetest white brocade wrap with a sable collar, – oh, it’s terrible sad.You must see it’. Parker and Benchley disown the feminising threat ofthe middlebrow as a symbol of materialism and manipulability.

While an anxiety about feminisation fuels this humour, as itdivides the professional sophisticate from the amateur sap and thewit from the woman, Parker also acknowledges that the supposedlynon-commercial and authentic posture of the avant-garde artist is alsogendered. In ‘Non-Professional Critics’, Parker’s ‘Man from GreenwichVillage’ complains about a popular drama: ‘it was not virile enough totear me out of myself. [Zoe] Akins has promise, perhaps, but she mustguard against selling her soul for thirty pieces of popularity. She hasobscured the main motif of all true drama – the splendid sex-hungerof the woman for the man – with a mass of lines and situations; sheshould strip it beautifully bare, to stand in glorious nudity’.77 Here,the professionalism of the female middlebrow playwright exposes themasculinism of the modernist. Parker recognises that the stakes of thecultural marketplace and canon making are never purely artistic.

Medium-ship: Professionalism and Play inMiddlebrow Monologues

In their theatre reviews, both Benchley and Parker associatedprofessionalism with monotonous routines and a pragmatic visionof modern cultural artefacts. Benchley reminds his readers that theaudience is subject to the actor’s sometimes deceptive professionaltechniques: ‘Almost any line sounds significant if read slowly withoutmoving the face’.78 One expert can read another. While their dramacriticism treats professionalism as the seamless accompaniment oftheir unfolding personalities, Benchley and Parker use literary work,displaying the trope of theatricality and sometimes also imitatingdramatic forms, to illuminate the gap between prescribed professional

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roles and not simply the internal self (the terrain of the modernistwriter) but indeed the ideal of a self-authored public personality (thedomain of the middlebrow).

For example, Parker’s professional role as a poet is the lovelornand jaded modern woman. While this role may have set sail from herown mind, it is taken up by the currents of media culture and genderstereotypes and charts courses determined by the vagaries of publiclife rather than the desires of the individual writer. In ‘Pour PrendreCongé’, a poem published in The New Yorker, Parker acknowledges thateven sentiment can be a professional pose:

I’m sick of embarking in doriesUpon an emotional sea.I’m wearied of playing Dolores(A role never written for me).I’ll never again like a cub lickMy wounds while I squeal at the hurt.No more I’ll go walking in public,My heart hanging out of my shirt . . .I’m done with this burning and givingAnd reeling the rhymes of my woes.And how I’ll be making my living,The Lord in His mystery knows.79

Parker plays with her famous name (‘Dorothy’) in ‘dories’ and‘Dolores’. She combines the highbrow and the lowbrow in this allusionto ‘Dolores’, both the name of the main character in a Spanish operaand the stage name of Ziegfeld Follies star.80 The worldly humorist isalso a showgirl of the emotional spectacle, like Fanny Brice singing‘My Man’. As she contemplates fleeing her daily routine and takinga vacation, the poet-speaker criticises the sentimental striptease thatcomprises her professional persona.

The tension between personality and professionalism establishesthe middlebrow as a cultural space where the standardising routinesand rhythms of work meet the mitigating influence of individualismand play.81 In their theories of humour, Freud and Bergson bothdefine poles of release and control within the emotional economy ofjoking. For Freud, humour allows the release of forbidden infantileimpulses for nonsense and improvisation.82 For Bergson, laughter bothacknowledges and defies the increasing mechanisation of human life.83

In both theories of humour, these competing poles depend uponone another and indeed become difficult to differentiate. Infantileplay triggers adult satisfactions because of repression. Routinised

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movements become funny at the moment that the familiar andaccepted is rendered strange and conspicuous, even silly.

These poles of play and routine, leisure and control, representthe tensions in the modern culture of the American middle-class.Bureaucratised and routinised rhythms overtook prior work cultures,and Koritz observes that interwar drama addressed ‘rationalized labor,faceless bureaucracy, and mass production’ specifically as ‘threats tothe self-understanding and idealized subjectivity of the middle-class’.84

Erenberg points out that the corresponding growth of white-collarprofessions and urban leisure activities, including cabarets, dance halls,and theatres, meant that ‘Attributes of work seeped into play, andelements of play – personality, friendliness, amusement – into work.Entertainers and celebrities combined both. They had succeeded ina world requiring friendliness, personality, and getting along, andnow they could lead a life of expressiveness and play’.85 Throughtheir professional roles as print humorists, Parker and Benchley couldmodel a personalised and playful form of professional identity for theiraudiences.

In the stage directions for ‘The Treasurer’s Report’, Benchleydescribes the two competing attitudes of his speaker as a ‘facile, story-telling manner’ and ‘a quite spurious business-like air’. The relationshipbetween the improvised and the prescribed, the playful and theobligatory allows the personality of the individual to disrupt theprofessional role he ventriloquises. Benchley’s ‘Treasurer’s Report’takes a genre in bureaucratic life that seems too routine, boring,and even private – for a select audience only, and that audiencecompelled to attend – to qualify as performance and treats it as thoughit were theatre. The collapse of his command of language takescentre stage: ‘There seems to have been considerable talk goingaround about this not having been done quite as economically as itmight–have–been–done, when, as a matter of fact, the whole thing wasdone just as economically as possible – in fact, even more so’.86

The numbers man, the treasurer is supposed to be able to give anobjective account of the business, but his verbal clumsiness reveals theinefficiencies and inaccuracies that swamp the company he represents.The recitation of numbers confuses rather than clarifies the matter:‘Making a total disbursement of (hurriedly) . . . $416,546.75 or a netdeficit of – ah-several thousand dollars. Now, these figures bring usdown only to October . . . All those wishing the approximate figures forMay and August, however, may obtain them from me in the vestryafter the dinner’ (TR, 344). Numbers, which promise specificity, leadto further ambiguities of causation and accountability: ‘Then there was

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a loss, owing to – several things’ (TR, 343). Thus, the treasurer’s failureto follow form in presentation reveals the company’s failure to followform in expenditures.

As if budgetary inscrutability were not a sufficient premise forthe audience’s scepticism, the treasurer turns to sentiment to ballastthe reputation of the company. Even in his invocation of emotionand allegiance, he betrays the contradictions of public relations andmarketing:

We feel that, by taking the boy at this age, we can get closer to his realnature – for a boy has a very real nature, you may be sure – and bring himinto closer touch not only with the school, the parents, and with eachother, but also with the town in which they live, the country to whose flagthey pay allegiance, and to the – ah – (trailing off ) town in which they live.(TR, 339)

The rhetorical convention of parallel construction, designed toheighten the subject in each clause, collapses into repetition anddiminution, as the treasurer cannot find any object more impressivethan the flag. In the search for interiority (the boy’s ‘real nature’), thetreasurer can only list externals, and he gets lost in this list of socialcharacteristics. The possibility of an interior character seems dubiousand attenuated at best, evacuated at worst.

At the same time, errors in performance reassert the importanceof the individual. Like the talking cure, this monologue revealswhat the treasurer does not want to reveal; he performs, like thepatient in psychoanalysis, the revelation of the self. This patterndiverges from the planned form of the company’s speech. Benchleysuggests that the monologue was a repressed form for him the actorin his humorous introduction to the published text: ‘Perhaps, inaccordance with Freudian theories, if I rid myself of this thing whichhas been skulking in the back of my mind for eight years, I shallbe a normal man again’ (TR, 337). Identifying with the white-collarbusinessman, Benchley regains his artistic independence by parodyingthe bureaucratic rhetoric that inhabits the back of his mind.

Benchley plays with these two poles in his short fiction aswell, suggesting that performance changes received roles throughthe personality of the actor. In ‘From Nine to Five’, for example,the businessman narrator admits his mediocrity at office routines.Benchley turns his speech to his stenographer into a comicmonologue: ‘Let’s see, where were we? . . . Oh, yes, that our Mr. Mellishreports that he shaw the sipment – I mean saw the shipment – what’sthe matter with me?’ (ellipses in original).87 He draws attention to

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the intransigent materiality of language (‘We are, comma, therefore,comma, unable to . .’. [ellipses in original]) and the failed postureof masculine authority (‘She must think I am a damn fool’). Hisclownishness reveals the theatre that undergirds (and can undermine)bureaucracy and authority, and in so doing, Benchley suggests thatthese conventions can be played with by the individual actor andexposed as contingent and variable. In another story, Benchleyencapsulates the paradoxical relationship of professionalism and play:

There are the doers and the dreamers, the men who make every secondcount and the men who waste their time with nothing to show for it. Thefirst are the business men of the country, the others are the impracticalfellows who write and draw pictures. Or perhaps it is just the other way’round. I always get these things mixed.88

Getting these categories ‘mixed’ is the special opportunity ofthe middlebrow writer who identifies with both the artist andthe professional. Benchley recognises that both business men andimpractical fellows are ‘doers’ in their daily performances, but hesuggests that only the ‘dreamers’ recognise that the bluster of businessdiscourse and the cult of efficiency could disguise time wasting and theinsubstantiality of bureaucratic life.

When he published ‘The Treasurer’s Report’, Benchley disownedhis authorial relationship to the text: ‘I have never written it. I havebeen able to throw myself into a sort of trance while delivering it, sothat the horrible monotony of the thing made no impression on mynerve cells, but to sit down and put the threadbare words on paperhas always seemed just a little too much to bear’ (TR, 336). Benchleysounds like Bob Cratchit, suffering on behalf of the commercialScrooge, a mere copyist of threadbare words. For Benchley, literature iscompromised of rich, aestheticised words, not the ‘horrible monotony’of conventional speech. To acknowledge the ‘threadbare’ state of dailylanguage threatens to strain the subjectivity of the modern individual(to damage his ‘nerve cells’) – possibly because derived and endlesslyderivable language challenges the myth of individual subjectivity.

But in his allusion to a trance, he turns himself into a mediumfor language. By saying that he has ‘never written it’, Benchleyplaces his monologue in the performance tradition of mediumschannelling otherworldly voices, magicians, hypnotists, comedians,and improvisers. Benchley begrudgingly acknowledges the popularityof his work:

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I guess that no one ever got so sick of a thing as I, and all my friends, havegrown of this Treasurer’s Report. I did it every night and two matineesa week for nine months in the Third Music Box Revue. Following that,I did it for ten weeks in vaudeville around the country, I did it at banquetsand teas, at friends’ houses and in my own house, and finally went toHollywood and made a talking movie out of it. In fact, I have inflictedit on the public in every conceivable way except over the radio anddropping it from planes. (TR, 336)

Like lowbrow and middlebrow culture, Benchley has made waron the American mind, invading private spaces as well as public,carpet-bombing the country with his celebrity and the insipidnessof this parody. In spite of the squeamishness about collapsingcultural hierarchies that this imagery conveys, Benchley’s emphasison performance invokes the powerful combination of professionalismand play that he made his metier. Benchley repeats ‘I did it’ threetimes, reminding us with his demanding schedule that he is bothroutinised worker and also a bona fide Broadway star (‘every nightand two matinees a week’, ‘ten weeks in vaudeville’). Through ‘doing’and ‘making’ this act, Benchley places himself within the currents ofmodern culture. He may not have delivered his ‘Treasurer’s Report’ onthe radio, but like the radio, he can tune into the sounds of the times.

Parker also espouses an improvisatory aesthetic that combinescultural registers, and suggestively, she too aligns this talent forcombination with a kind of trance or semi-unconscious state. In‘The Little Hours’, a monologue published in The New Yorker inwhich the narrator bemoans her insomnia, Parker quotes from Frenchliterature – all the while complaining that she cannot escape thiscatalogue of cultural allusions in her mind – and then entangles thisheady stuff with celebrity gossip and painful puns: ‘I’d be bettercompany if I could quit thinking that La Fontaine married AlfredLunt. I don’t know what I’m doing mucking about with a lot ofFrench authors at this hour, anyway . . . And I’ll stay off Verlaine too;he was always chasing Rimbauds’. Parker combines highbrow andBroadway, the privacy of the boudoir with the wisecracking of thestage. A sophisticated aesthetic separates this heroine from the herd.Appropriately, insomniac Parker refuses to count sheep: ‘Let themcount themselves, if they’re so crazy mad after mathematics’. Evenin the solitude of her bedroom, Parker performs herself through ahodgepodge of cultural allusions and a literary voice of epigrams andvernacularisms. The biggest threat to her sense of personality andindeed her celebrity seems to be this immersion in privacy: ‘I’m nevergoing to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of

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Those Who Do Things. I don’t do anything. Not one single thing. Iused to bite my nails, but I don’t even do that anymore’.89

Domesticity and Drama: Choosing Fun Over FamilyFor both Parker and Benchley, the privacy of the home threatens toestablish the herd mentality over the individualism of the sophisticate.Domestic spaces enshrine limited gender roles, while cityscapes allowfor pleasure and performance. Benchley celebrates the evening, notthe workday, the party, not the routine. His sophistication grants himan escape from the banal, solace from standardisation. In ‘One Minute,Please!’, Benchley exempts himself from bureaucratic seriousness andits efficient model of masculinity:

Get me a hundred of my old schoolmates together and let them talk from9 A.M. until almost dinner time and I won’t understand a word they aresaying. It is only around dinner time that I begin to catch a glimmer ofsense and then they have to come right out and say ‘Martini’ or ‘Greenturtle soup’. At this point I join the party.90

In spite of the pleasures of martinis and green turtle soup, thisstory betrays anxiety about his refined relationship to pleasure andlanguage; it threatens dandyism or even homosexuality to enjoy thepleasures of the flesh, the table, and the stage.

In his taxonomy of ‘The Typical New Yorker’, Benchley contendsthat most New Yorkers are ‘one-hundred-percent American, one-hundred-percent business, and one-hundred percent dull’. Even whilehe seems to identify with this dullness, Benchley reminds his readerthat his own ‘present work – and play – takes me almost nightly intothe slightly lopsided maelstrom of the pixie activities in the theatresand night clubs’. The nightlife, Benchley’s ‘play’ in the maelstrom,keeps him out of the frustrations of middle-class identity, ‘all so MiddleWestern and tentative’. In this essay, Benchley juxtaposes the domesticman who ‘has a vague feeling that he is not au courant with theworld’s events and thoughts, and so subscribes to The Literary Digestor Time – which his wife reads’ with the flamboyance of ‘millions of gaypixies, flitting about constantly in a sophisticated manner in search ofa new thrill’.91

This language flirts with homosexuality without explicitly namingit. By comparison, the bureaucratic and domestic routines of marriedlife seem both boring and derivative. By visiting theatres andnightclubs for a living, Benchley can achieve sophistication withoutforegoing his credentials of heterosexuality. Domesticity symbolises

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conformity, regimentation, privatisation, and feminisation, and allof these forces threaten individualism and personality. In oneVanity Fair article, Benchley jokes revealingly that ‘Simply becauseBroadway is dark is no reason why we should return to the old-fashioned and reactionary custom of staying at home after dinner.Home-life is now designed solely for inmates of institutions’.92

Anticipating the contemporary theoretical association of queer cultureand performance, for Benchley, the theatre promises a jailbreak fromdomesticity and heteronormativity.

Parker depicts the pitfalls of privacy in the same way. Inher play Close Harmony, or the Lady Next Door (1924), Parkercollaborated with Elmer Rice, whose expressionist drama The AddingMachine (1923) represented the dehumanisation of office workersby routine and machine. In Close Harmony, Parker and Rice mounta conventional critique of middlebrow culture as obsessed withconsumerism, hopelessly feminised, and devoid of taste. The openingstage directions offer a rather blatant indictment of suburban livingand middle-class conformity. This living room is ‘forty-seven minutes fromCentral Station’, appears just ‘like every other living room in every othermiddle-class suburban house’, includes ‘no marks of their personalities uponit’, features ‘pictures . . . of the wedding-present school of art’, and, perhapsmost damningly, ‘several books, never touched’.93

It would be easy to read this play as a conventional presentationof the ugly suburban middle-class.94 The gender-dynamics arepredictable. Ed Graham is a soft-spoken professional man whocommutes into the city each day for work. His wife and sister-in-law constantly criticise him, forcing Ed to give up his mandolin andtreating him like a child. Next door lives a former showgirl, Mrs.Sheridan, lonely and alienated from her brusque husband who isseldom home. Predictably, Mrs. Sheridan and Ed find one another,and as the anthology Best Plays of 1924–1925 put it: ‘they harmonizesomething swell’.95 They contemplate running off with one another,but Ed cannot abandon his family. Mrs. Sheridan leaves, and Ed,heartened by her devotion, adopts the role of patriarch that he hadabandoned.

Part of Ed’s appeal as a character lies in his delight in New Yorktheatre; he cajoles his resistant wife, saying there is ‘no reason whywe couldn’t take in a show sometime’ (CH, 22). Correspondingly, itis a sign of sister-in-law Ada’s awfulness that she never dreamed ofperforming: ‘Funny, somehow I never cared anything about goingon the stage, even when I was a girl’.96 She literally lacks a senseof play. Mrs. Sheridan embraces sensual release and interpersonal

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improvisation, dancing with Ed in her living room: ‘She goes to thephonograph and puts on a jazz record) There, that’s the stuff – let’sgo!’ (CH, 66). Harriet, by contrast, budgets her husband’s access topleasure: ‘Oh, that Daddy of ours, he’d be spending all his money ontheatres, if we didn’t watch him’ (CH, 51).

In the middlebrow culture wars, Parker and Rice place gentilityat odds with jazz, routine at odds with release. Ed is not a greatmusician, and Mrs. Sheridan is not a fine actress. He is an amateurmandolin player and theatre spectator, and she is a showgirl andpiano teacher. They are as much a middlebrow demographic asAda, Harriet, and Sister. But delight in play – theatrical, musical, andconversational – relieves the conformity of their suburban existence.Through her amateur bohemianism, Mrs. Sheridan embraces self-expression:

The doors, stair-closet, etc., are in the same places, and made of the same kindof wood. But in the decoration of the room, MRS. SHERIDAN has let herselfgo. The walls are covered with flamboyantly figured paper, in which bright bluesand yellow predominate. No two articles of furniture are covered with the samepatterned material. There are piles of pillows on the couch . . . The walls arecrowded with pictures – some photographs, some colored prints of subjects thatMRS. SHERIDAN admires. (CH, 37)

Mrs. Sheridan’s playfulness shapes her relationship to commodities.Unlike Ed’s wife who rigidly imitates a genteel ideal and standardisedidentity, Mrs. Sheridan ‘let[s] herself go’ in creating a collage of herpersonal tastes. She is a middlebrow fan and reader; her space iscovered with ‘the magazines treating of moving pictures, the stage, andfashions’. She makes herself at home amidst the artefacts she selects:‘there is something pleasantly comfortable, gay and informal about the place.You would much rather be there than in the Grahams’ living-room’ (CH, 37).

Mrs. Sheridan seems to have learned this sense of self fromher professional role within the theatre: ‘Gee, when I think of methree years ago . . . (Proudly) I used to be on the stage, you know’(30, ellipses in original). She has created a set for her performanceof private life, but she lacks a leading man. Professionalism trumpsdomesticity, as Mrs. Sheridan takes an offer for a position in the Follies.Parker thus reverses the typical association of femininity, gentility, anddomesticity in popular middlebrow culture, as in Crothers’ popularflapper romances. In a review of Crothers’ 39 East, Parker objected toits gender ideology: ‘Many people say that ‘39 East’ is such a sweet,clean, moral play. Oh, very well – if you think it’s a moral play because

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it preaches the great lesson that no decent woman can support herself,why, go ahead’.97

Privileging pleasure and play over routine and convention,professionalism and independence over domesticity and conformity,Parker validates a model of middlebrow identity that values witover pedigree (rejecting the upper crust), improvisation overa scripted existence (redefining middle-class conventions), andBroadway over bookishness (renewing modern vernaculars overhighbrow intellectualism). While Harriet counsels Ed to ‘for goodness’sake, play soft!’, the audience can almost hear Parker urging him toplay loud (CH, 91). In spite of their sometimes anxious depictionsof the middle classes, both Parker and Benchley see an opportunityin the supposed dangers of middlebrow culture – its broad audienceand motley collection of genres, artefacts, and registers – to facilitateindividual expression, cultivate sceptical sensibilities, and liberate newsources of pleasure from the lockdown of pretension or repression.For culture makers and consumers dissatisfied with normative roles,the theatricalisation of private life provided one of middlebrowsophistication’s most daring opportunities.

AcknowledgementsI offer many thanks to editor Melissa Sullivan for her comments andrevision suggestions, to colleague David Shields for his expertise onmodern Broadway history, to doctoral candidate Jamie Libby Boylefor her insights on middlebrow identity and performance, and tomodern drama scholar Lawrence Switzky for his replies to last-minuteinquiries about theatrical modernism. Their generous contributionshave improved and enriched this essay.

Notes1. Billy Altman, Laughter’s Gentle Soul: The Life of Robert Benchley (New York: W. W.

Norton & Co., 1997), p. 199.2. Quoted in Jay Malarcher, ‘No, Sirree! A One-Night Stand with the Algonquin’s

“Vicious Circle’’,’ in Art, Glitter, and Glitz: Mainstream Playwrights and Popular Theatrein 1920s America, ed. Arthur Gewirtz and James J. Kolb (Westport, CT: PraegarPublishers, 2004), p. 152.

3. Alice Kessler-Harris suggests that the flapper role served to justify and compensatefor women’s marginal participation in the work force. Alice Kessler-Harris, Outto Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2003), p. 249.

4. Vaudeville also shed its atmosphere of disrepute in these decades, ‘becom[ing]an acceptable family entertainment for the middle and working classes’. LewisErenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture,1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 67.

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5. ‘The Middlebrow’, New York Herald Tribune, reprinted in Berkeley Daily Gazette, 21October 1926: p. 4.

6. Brighton Perry [Robert Benchley], ‘We Offer Big Profits in Little Theatres’, VanityFair, October 1917: p. 114.

7. Ronald Wainscott, The Emergence of the Modern American Theater, 1914–1929 (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 72; 61.

8. David Savran observes that in Broadway theatres, these social divides were oftenreflected in the layout of the theatre: ‘a downstairs crowd, rich in economicand symbolic capital but with variable amounts of cultural capital, and agallery audience, richer in cultural capital than economic capital’. David Savran,Highbrow/Lowdown: Theatre, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 2009), p. 143.

9. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar,Straus, & Giroux, 1995), p. 55.

10. To list just a few examples: James Weldon Johnson wrote song lyrics for blackmusicals when he came to New York in 1899. P. G. Wodehouse served as dramacritic for Vanity Fair and collaborated with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern onmusical Oh, Lady, Lady!! (1918). Ring Lardner wrote lyrics for the Ziegfeld Follies.Franklin Pierce Adams created the character Dulcinea in his Conning Towercolumn, Kaufman and Connelly’s inspiration for their comedy Dulcy (1921). EdnaSt. Vincent Millay wrote Aria da Capo for the Provincetown Players, and shewrote comic sketches in play form for Vanity Fair, pieces she later collected inDistressing Dialogues (1924). For Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), Jessie Fausetcontemplated the cultural impact of Bert Williams and his rueful humor. AnitaLoos collaborated with her husband on the 1926 Broadway adaptation of herbest-selling novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammersteinadapted Algonquin Round Tabler Edna Ferber’s novel Show Boat, in 1927. AliceDuer Miller’s novel Gowns by Roberta (1933) became Jerome Kern’s musical Roberta,featuring the now-standard song ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’.

11. According to historian William R. Taylor, the highest concentration of Broadwaytheatres in the 1920s lay ‘between Broadway and Eighth Avenue and Forty-fourthand Forty-seventh streets’. The Round Tablers met for lunch at the AlgonquinHotel on Forty-fourth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and Taylor pointsout that ‘the principle magazines specializing in urban sophistication, Vanity Fair,the Smart Set, and the New Yorker were clustered by the mid-twenties on Forty-thirdand Forty-fourth streets east of Sixth Avenue’. William R. Taylor, Inventing TimesSquare: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1991), p. 215.

12. Dorothy Parker, ‘My Home Town’, in The Portable Dorothy Parker, ed. Marion Meade(New York: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 460–61.

13. Wainscott, The Emergence of the Modern American Theater, p. 61.14. Benchley, ‘Heartbreak House’, in Benchley at the Theatre: Dramatic Criticism,

1920–1940, ed. Charles Getchell (Ipswich, MA: The Ipswich Press, 1985),p. 6.

15. Koritz, Culture Makers, p. 24.16. Black performers and playwrights had to contend with the legacy of minstrelsy and

the fantasy of primitivism on the Broadway stage. David Krasner argues that ‘blackmodernity represented a desire to transform the image of black culture from minstrelsy tosophisticated urbanity’ (italics in original). David Krasner, A Beautiful Pageant: African

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American Theater, Drama, and Performance in the Harlem Renaissance, 1910–1927 (NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 10.

17. Parker, ‘Are You a Glossy?’, Vanity Fair, April 1918: p. 57.18. Parker, ‘No More Fun’, The New Yorker, 21 March 1931: p. 36.19. Michael Kammen, American Cultures, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth

Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 110.20. Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: the Book-of-the Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle

Class Desire (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 152.21. Cole Porter, ‘You’re the Top’, in The Complete Lyrics of Cole Porter, ed. Robert Kimball

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), p. 120. David Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism:Recontextualizing the American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2003),p. 15.

22. See Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: TheUniversity of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. xii–xiii.

23. Van Wyck Brooks, ‘ “Highbrow’’ and “Lowbrow’’ ’, in Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years,A Selection from His Works, 1908–1921, ed. Claire Sprague (New York: Harper & Row,1968), p. 86.

24. Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924), p. 281.25. Ibid., p. 108.26. Parker, ‘The First Shows of Summer’, Vanity Fair, August 1919: p. 23.27. Parker, ‘Life’s Valentines: Mr. Avery Hopwood’, in Complete Poems (New York:

Penguin Classics, 2010), p. 28028. Porter, ‘Ridin’ High’, in The Complete Lyrics, p. 149.29. Joseph Litvak points out that ‘we cannot so neatly dissociate the sophistication

whose sexual politics we embrace from the sophistication whose class politicswe abhor’. Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 7.

30. Benchley, ‘High Tide,’ The New Yorker, 4 February 1933: p. 24.31. Litvak argues that class anxiety about sophistication often masks or justifies sexual

criticisms of this posture – see Litvak, Strange Gourmets, p. 2. This anxiety aboutsexuality and class also characterises repudiations of middlebrow culture as Savrannotes – see Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism, p. 6.

32. Faye Hammill, Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History (Liverpool: LiverpoolUniversity Press, 2010), p. 21.

33. Wainscott observes that Broadway comedies ‘took a curious position that straddledthe old and the new by exploiting the new fashions, language, and openness whileenshrining many traditional values’. Wainscott, The Emergence of the Modern Theater,p. 67.

34. George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, Dulcy, in Longer Plays by Modern Authors,ed. Helen Louise Cohen (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1922),p. 177. Kaufman and Connelly, To the Ladies (New York: Samuel French, 1923),p. 24.

35. Rachel Crothers, Expressing Willie, Nice People, 39 East: Three Plays By Rachel Crothers(New York: Brentano’s, 1924), pp. 37; 48.

36. Parker, ‘Lynn Fontanne’, in Complete Poems, p. 267.37. George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, Six Plays By Kaufman and Hart (New York: The

Modern Library, 1942), pp. 133; 124; 135.38. Litvak argues that ‘sophistication offends not only in its artificiality but in its

excessiveness: the sophisticate enjoys (himself or herself) too much, which is to

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say, at the expense of others, provoking a populist resentment that almost alwaysparades as an indignant sexual morality’. Litvak, Strange Gourmets, p. 7.

39. Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (New York: Penguin Books,1989), p. 45.

40. Parker, ‘Kindly Accept Substitutes’, in The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 484.41. Warren Susman neatly formulates the paradox: ‘The importance of being different,

special, unusual, of standing out in a crowd – all of this is emphasised at the sametime that specific directions are provided for achieving just those ends’. WarrenSusman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the TwentiethCentury (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2003), pp. 277–278).

42. Thomas Strychacz observes that ‘a culture of professionalism arose out of themassive reorientation of American society toward corporate capitalism and asa response, at least in part, to a crisis of identity and authority among themiddle classes’. Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 22.

43. Savran decries Nathan’s ‘lifelong and almost preternatural sensitivity to and scornfor the mixture of highbrow and lowbrow’. Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown, p. 261.

44. Brooks, ‘ “Highbrow’’ and “Lowbrow’’ ’: p. 96.45. Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, p. 295.46. Alexander Woollcott, Enchanted Aisles (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), p. 76.47. Jessica Burstein notes that ‘Parker ‘distinguishes herself as uncommon by ironically

parading her tendency to weep’ (italics in original). Jessica Burstein, ‘A Few WordsAbout Dubuque: Modernism, Sentimentalism, and the Blasé’, American LiteraryHistory 14, no. 2 (Summer 2002): p. 234.

48. Benchley, ‘An Open Letter to the Public’, in Benchley at the Theatre, p. 39.49. Benchley, ‘Dynamo’, in Benchley at the Theatre, p. 96.50. Parker, ‘All’s Quiet Along the Rialto’, Vanity Fair, March 1919: p. 92.51. Rubin argues that the personalisation of criticism marked a crucial transition

toward modern consumer individualism for middlebrow culture. She points outthat Heywood Broun, friend to Benchley and Parker, fellow drama critic, and earlymember of the Book-of-the-Month Club Board of Judges, embraced a ‘shift awayfrom literature and toward the personal’ and that ‘his authority [relied] not on hisability to supply the rarefied perceptions that came from specialised training butinstead on his flair for communicating the down-to-earth observations that anyonemight make’. Rubin further notes that, like Benchley and Parker, ‘he displayedhis individualism in a completely urban context’, one in which ‘approbationdepended on a showy display of quick wit’. Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture,pp. 139–140.

52. Benchley, ‘Dawn’, The New Yorker, 13 June 1931: p. 30.53. Parker, ‘The New Plays’, Vanity Fair, November 1918: p. 100.54. Benchley, ‘How to Understand Music’, in The Benchley Roundup, ed. Nathaniel

Benchley (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 210.55. Parker, ‘Henry Ibsen: Hedda Gabler’, in The Portable Dorothy Parker, p. 471.56. Parker, ‘A Hymn of Hate: The Drama’, in Complete Poems, p. 249.57. Parker, ‘Signs of Spring in the Theatre’, Vanity Fair, May 1919: p. 94.58. Parker, ‘A Hymn of Hate: The Drama’, p. 249.59. Parker, ‘Oscar Wilde: An Ideal Husband’, in The Portable Dorothy Parker, pp. 472–73.60. Frost uses this phrase to explain humorist Anita Loos’ appeal to modern audiences

confronted by cultural hierarchy, an appeal shared by Benchley and Parker.

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Laura Frost, ‘Anita Loos and the Language of Silent Cinema,’ Modernism/modernity17.2 (April 2010): pp. 308.

61. Nina Miller notes a ‘seeming contradiction’ in Benchley and Parker between‘expressions of sophistication’ and ‘an emphatically inclusive rhetorical mode’, andshe suggests that these writers used sophistication to ‘deny the mass character oftheir mass audience’. Instead, I propose that sophisticated humour served as sucha potent middlebrow aesthetic precisely because it defined its elites in terms ofpersonal taste and ironic sensibility, what Rubin calls ‘the successful performingself’. As Rubin notes in The Making of Middlebrow Culture, the privileging of attitudeover academic qualifications ‘theoretically gave culture more accessibility’ because‘self-expression required no training in literature’ (or drama, in this case). NinaMiller, Making Love Modern: The Intimate Publics of New York’s Literary Women (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 98. Rubin, The Making of MiddlebrowCulture, p. 140.

62. Parker, ‘Leo Tolstoi: Redemption’, in The Portable Dorothy Parker, pp. 474–75.63. Benchley, ‘More Like It’, The New Yorker, 26 April 1930: p. 27.64. Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown, p. 231.65. Benchley, ‘Top’, The New Yorker, 7 November 1931: pp. 28.66. Savran, Highbrow/Lowdown, p. 97.67. Benchley, ‘High Tide’, The New Yorker, 4 February 1933: pp. 24.68. Parker, ‘A Succession of Musical Comedies’, Vanity Fair, April 1918: p. 97.69. Benchley, ‘Sporting Life in America: Dozing’, in The Treasurer’s Report and Other

Aspects of Community Singing (New York: Harper & Brothers), p. 247.70. Parker, ‘J. M. Barrie: Dear Brutus’, in The Portable Dorothy Parker, pp. 475–76.71. Benchley, ‘More Like It’, The New Yorker, 26 April 1930: p. 28.72. Parker, ‘Unions Forever!’, Vanity Fair, November 1919: p. 37.73. Benchley, ‘A Few Blighters at Our Theatres’, Vanity Fair, December 1917: pp. 70;

136.74. Benchley, ‘Matinees – Wednesdays and Saturdays’, in The Benchley Roundup, p. 225.75. Helen Wells [Parker], ‘Who’s Who in the Audience’, Vanity Fair, January 1920:

p. 59.76. Benchley, ‘Matinees’, p. 226.77. Helen Wells [Parker], ‘The Non-Professional Critics’, Vanity Fair, February 1920:

p. 49.78. Benchley, ‘More Like It’, The New Yorker, 26 April 1930: p. 28.79. Parker, ‘Pour Prendre Congé’, in Complete Poems, p. 146.80. Both ‘Dolores’s were featured in Vanity Fair magazine. See Pitts Sanborn, ‘The

Spanish Invasion’, Vanity Fair, April 1918: p. 96. See also ‘Dolores – Personifyingthe Spirit of Vanity’, Vanity Fair, December 1919: p. 62.

81. Koritz suggests that rhythm served a metaphorical function in theatre and dance,an attempt to dramatise and negotiate the restrictions of modern work, whether atthe assembly line or office desk. So too does Savran see jazz as a cultural symbolboth of driving beat and liberating syncopation. Their astute assessments of theseambivalent combinations inform my analysis.

82. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, ed. and trans. JamesStrachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1960), pp. 152–158.

83. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Fred Rothwell(New York: Macmillan, 1914), p. 21.

84. Koritz, Culture Makers, p. 37.

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85. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, p. 201.86. Benchley, ‘The Treasurer’s Report’, in The Treasurer’s Report and Other Aspects of

Community Singing (New York: Harper & Brothers), p. 338–39. Subsequent citationsappear in parentheses after the quoted text.

87. Benchley, ‘From Nine to Five’, in The Benchley Roundup, p. 28.88. Benchley, ‘ ‘One Minute, Please!’,’ in The Benchley Roundup, p. 173.89. Parker, ‘The Little Hours’, in The Portable Dorothy Parker, pp. 255; 257.90. Benchley, “One Minute Please’,’ in The Benchley Roundup, p. 169.91. Benchley, ‘The Typical New Yorker’, in The Benchley Roundup, pp. 136; 137.92. Benchley, ‘Broadway By Candlelight’, Vanity Fair, March 1918: p. 64.93. Parker and Elmer Rice, Close Harmony or The Lady Next Door: A Play in Three Acts

(New York: Samuel French, 1924), p. 5. Subsequent citations appear in parenthesesafter the quoted text.

94. Savran observes that ‘fears about standardization, commodity culture,victimization, organized labor, and ‘mass man’ are routinely displaced onto womenand the domestic sphere’. Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism, p. 8.

95. Burns Mantle, ed., The Best Plays of 1924–1925 and the Year Book of the Drama inAmerica (New York: Dodd, Small, Maynard, and Company, 1925), p. 496

96. Parker and Rice, Close Harmony, pp. 50–51.97. Parker, ‘Signs of Spring in the Theatre’, Vanity Fair, May 1919: p. 100.

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Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker ‘In Broadway Playhouses’: Middlebrow Theatricality and Sophisticated Humour

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