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.

During the Depression decade, Robert Benchley wrote nearly seventy-five casual essays for the New Yorker, most of which have been collected in the five books he published in the 1930s—The Treasurer's Report (1930), No Poems (1932), From Bed to Worse (1934), My Ten Years in a Quandary (1936), After 1903—What? (1938). Some of these pieces are brief humorous asides—similar to his contributions of the late 1920s, when he provided many fillers for...