Robert Benchley

Robert Charles Benchley (1889–1945) was an American humorist, drama critic and actor, a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table who wrote for Vanity Fair, Life and The New Yorker before a second career in short comic films. His speciality was the flustered ordinary man defeated by ordinary things, delivered in a tone of unbothered self-deprecation — which is exactly why this joke fits him so comfortably, and exactly why it stuck to him. He did not invent it. Quote Investigator finds the gag in print in 1912, when Benchley was twenty-two and years from publishing humour, and his name was first attached to it in Reader’s Digest in September 1949, four years after his death.