Humor & Life Quote by Robert Benchley

Benchley’s line lands like a genteel tap that turns out to be a slap: it uses the language of “chivalry” to expose how absurdly polite culture can get about brutality. The joke isn’t simply shock value. It’s the whiplash between an antique moral code and an act so plainly monstrous that no code should be able to launder it. By framing murder as a social faux pas - “just a bit unchivalrous” - Benchley parodies a society more fluent in manners than in ethics, where the vocabulary of gentlemanliness can hover over anything, even violence.

The specific intent is satiric inversion. He stages the speaker as a self-satisfied “man” inconvenienced by modern sensibilities: “Even nowadays” implies a nostalgia for earlier times when, supposedly, male entitlement ran on fewer constraints. That “can’t step up” is crucial; it treats killing like stepping up to a dance card or taking a turn at the podium. Benchley’s rhythm makes the horror feel procedural, which is the point: patriarchal violence often hides inside everyday scripts.

Context matters. Writing in the early 20th-century American humor tradition, Benchley mined the gap between respectable speech and ugly reality. The subtext is not “men want to kill women,” but that a culture obsessed with gallantry can still center male comfort even when discussing women’s harm. The line skewers the moral vanity of “chivalry” itself: a code that flatters men as protectors while leaving women’s safety contingent on men’s self-image.