"We are constantly being surprised that people did things well before we were born"
About this Quote
Benchley’s joke lands because it skewers a very modern vanity: the assumption that our era is the first to be clever, competent, or fully awake. “Constantly being surprised” turns ignorance into a recurring lifestyle, a loop of rediscovery that feels uncomfortably familiar in today’s churn of “new” hacks, “new” relationship advice, “new” political insights that are, on inspection, old wine in freshly optimized bottles.
The sentence works as comedy because it pretends to be an innocent observation while quietly indicting its audience. Benchley doesn’t accuse us of arrogance; he lets the grammar do it. The passive construction (“being surprised”) makes the speaker sound like a helpless victim of history, when the real culprit is willful present-ism: a refusal to grant past people full personhood, full ingenuity. The punchline is that our surprise is the tell. If we’re shocked they “did things well,” we’ve been assuming they didn’t.
Context matters. Benchley wrote in an early 20th-century America intoxicated by speed: automobiles, movies, radio, the rising religion of “progress.” That atmosphere breeds a particular kind of smugness: if technology advances, surely humans do too. Benchley punctures that belief without sermonizing. He suggests the opposite: that competence is not a timeline reward, and that our awe at old excellence is less about their achievement than our shallow relationship with the past.
Underneath the laugh is a warning about cultural amnesia. When you treat history as primitive, you miss its sophistication - and you repeat its mistakes with better lighting.
The sentence works as comedy because it pretends to be an innocent observation while quietly indicting its audience. Benchley doesn’t accuse us of arrogance; he lets the grammar do it. The passive construction (“being surprised”) makes the speaker sound like a helpless victim of history, when the real culprit is willful present-ism: a refusal to grant past people full personhood, full ingenuity. The punchline is that our surprise is the tell. If we’re shocked they “did things well,” we’ve been assuming they didn’t.
Context matters. Benchley wrote in an early 20th-century America intoxicated by speed: automobiles, movies, radio, the rising religion of “progress.” That atmosphere breeds a particular kind of smugness: if technology advances, surely humans do too. Benchley punctures that belief without sermonizing. He suggests the opposite: that competence is not a timeline reward, and that our awe at old excellence is less about their achievement than our shallow relationship with the past.
Underneath the laugh is a warning about cultural amnesia. When you treat history as primitive, you miss its sophistication - and you repeat its mistakes with better lighting.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
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