Humor & Life Quote by Robert Benchley

Benchley turns ignorance into a craft, and the joke lands because it’s delivered with the posture of self-improvement. The line mimics the language of earnest striving - “I have tried,” “I have succeeded” - then swaps the expected virtue (knowledge, mastery, culture) for its opposite. That inversion is classic Benchley: a polite sentence wearing a clown nose. It’s not a confession so much as a parody of the era’s anxious respectability, when being “well-read” functioned like a social passport and self-cultivation was treated as moral hygiene.

The specific intent is twofold. First, it’s a defensive maneuver dressed as comedy: if you claim your not-knowing is intentional, no one can use it against you. Second, it’s a jab at the performative pressure to have opinions on everything. Benchley’s “great many things” hints at the expanding modern world - mass media, expert culture, endless committees of taste - where the educated person is expected to keep up, constantly.

Subtext: ignorance isn’t always a failure; it can be self-preservation. There’s also a sly critique of expertise as status theater. By framing ignorance as an achievement, Benchley exposes how arbitrary our intellectual pecking orders can be, and how often “knowing” is less about understanding than about being seen in the right conversations.

Context matters: Benchley wrote in a period when humorists (especially in the Algonquin orbit) thrived on puncturing high-minded pretension. The line survives because it still fits our own information-glut moment, where not engaging can read like laziness - or sanity.