The Witness

This Robert Benchley feature is both amusing and pointed. Benchley plays a role that is somewhat different from the lecturer or narrator roles that he so often assumed, but he does a good job. His character is the means for satirizing both the government and himself.

It starts with Benchley's Joe Doakes character reading the paper and getting wound up about the way that a government committee has been interrogating its witnesses. Doakes then fantasizes about appearing before the committee, and getting the best of them. It's clever in that it effectively deflates the kind of self-important government figures that plague almost every era, while at the same time more gently lampooning the kind of person whom Doakes represents, with his unlikely but entirely understandable fantasizing.

Benchley handles this kind of feature well, with his dry delivery and good timing. Just when it seems as if it is going to run out of steam, it closes with a good gag that is also very appropriate to the ideas behind the feature. The subject matter itself is also still relevant, and indeed would be so at almost any time.