He wasn't lazy. He liked to put things off as long as he could. He was a procrastinator. He got his copy done just in the nick of time for the New Yorker. They often had to send runners out to get it. Benchley's law is "Any man can do any amount of work, provided it's not the work he's supposed to be doing." So he would find all manner of things to do rather than start a piece.

A. J. Liebling's name is so firmly identified with the New Yorker's Wayward Press column—even now, more than twenty years after his death—that the work of his illustrious predecessor in that department is almost forgotten. Yet Robert Benchley wrote press criticism for the magazine from 1927 to 1939, and to read through his seventy-four columns, as I have just done, is not only to taste the pleasures of Benchley's...