Humor & Life Quote by Robert Benchley

Benchley lands the punch by pretending that physics is just another petty civic dispute: if you don't like the rules, leave town. The joke is the willful category error. Natural law isn't municipal code, and Einstein isn't a crank complaining at a zoning meeting. By flattening relativity into the rhetoric of nativist scolding, Benchley exposes how reflexive that scolding is: an all-purpose comeback that requires zero engagement with the actual complaint.

The line’s specific intent is less to mock Einstein than to mock the speaker Benchley conjures, the kind of person who treats complexity as insolence. Einstein’s theories had seeped into popular culture in the 1920s and 30s as both celebrity science and faintly suspicious abstraction, easy to caricature as a foreign professor "messing with" reality. Benchley taps that cultural moment: the anxiety that expertise rewrites common sense, and that common sense should be allowed to vote on whether spacetime curves.

The subtext is sharper. "Go back to where he came from" is an immigrant-taunt dressed up as patriotic pragmatism, and Benchley knows it. Einstein, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, made the phrase bruise with real-world menace even as it’s played for laughs. Benchley’s comedy works because it mirrors the era’s xenophobic reflex and lets its stupidity indict itself. The universe doesn’t care who you are; the speaker does. That’s the target.