Humor & Life Quote by Robert Benchley

Benchley’s punchline lands because it flatters and skewers at the same time: we love to believe our words are “us,” but the moment they’re extracted and displayed, they start performing like trained animals. “Surest way” is the comedian’s absolutism, a mock-law of human behavior delivered with deadpan confidence. The real bite is in “make a monkey of a man.” Quoting isn’t framed as clarification or tribute; it’s a humiliation ritual, the civilized version of pointing and laughing. Put someone’s line in quotation marks and you turn a living, adaptive speaker into a static exhibit.

The subtext is about power. The quoter controls the lighting, the timing, the audience, the surrounding narration. Even accurate quotations can be made ridiculous through selection, truncation, or strategic framing. Benchley is warning that “context” isn’t a nice academic add-on; it’s the difference between a thought and a gag. A man speaking extemporaneously can revise, soften, explain. A man being quoted is stuck mid-grimace.

Benchley wrote in a culture where newspapers, magazines, and radio were turning talk into copy at industrial speed, and where urbane humor thrived on puncturing pretension. His line anticipates our own era of screenshots and viral pull-quotes: the internet doesn’t just remember what you said, it curates it for maximum spectacle. The joke is that quoting seems like respectability, but it’s also a banana peel.