Wit & Attitude Quote by Robert Benchley

Benchley’s line works because it refuses the comforting fiction that alcohol is the culprit. The real target is human self-delusion: drinking doesn’t manufacture stupidity so much as amplify what’s already there. He opens with a blunt, almost moralistic claim, then undercuts it with the nastier joke - people are “such fools to begin with.” That pivot is the mechanism: it drags the reader from judging the drunk to recognizing the baseline absurdity of everyday behavior. The laugh lands as a small humiliation.

“Compounding a felony” is doing sly work. It borrows the language of law to describe something socially sanctioned, even celebrated, which sharpens the irony. Benchley isn’t mounting a temperance lecture; he’s mimicking the severity of a prosecutor to mock the mismatch between our consequences and our casual choices. The phrase also hints at escalation: when you start from a deficit (ordinary foolishness), adding alcohol isn’t a single mistake, it’s negligence layered on negligence.

Context matters. Benchley wrote in an era when drinking culture was both contested and omnipresent: Prohibition and its fallout turned alcohol into a stage for hypocrisy, bravado, and private messes. His comedy thrived on that tension. The subtext is less “don’t drink” than “stop pretending you’re in control.” If you’re already ridiculous, intoxication isn’t an escape from the self - it’s an accelerant.