User Reviews

You have to be a ROBERT BENCHLEY fan to appreciate his dry humor, especially when he deals with the even drier subject of this supposedly humorous sketch about a scientist talking about his latest find--"the newt." We never actually see what he's talking about. He makes several efforts to reach into a tank full of specimens but each time has to draw back, smile and say he'll take another look later. Meanwhile, his grumpy assistant is working nearby at a work table.

He then uses charts to illustrate his remarks--and naturally, none of them shed any light on the situation at all.

Finally, his assistant who has more experience with the newt, is asked to reach into the tank so Benchley can display the newt to the audience.

The weak payoff has Benchley showing that the little creature is invisible, even though it drops with a plopping sound when he tosses it back into the tank.

Silly stuff no matter how you look at it. Certainly not one of his best skits.

Only the great humorous Robert Benchley could take such an offbeat topic as "The Courtship of the Newt" and make it excruciatingly funny. His low-key style comic delivery has been copied many times but seldom, if ever, equaled. The more satirical but less farcical comedy of radio and television greats Bob and Ray owed much to Robert Benchley's brand of hilarity. Benchley's influence can even be seen and heard in the later marvels of British buffoonery Monty Python and in the far-out antics of Firesign Theatre. Benchley down played both his humor and his acting, but was a master of both--and a gifted writer to boot.

While "The Courthsip of the Newt" isn't quite on a par with his Oscar winning "How to Sleep," it is still a joy to behold, especially for those comedy lovers who haven't been exposed to Benchley's shorts of the 30's and 40's.

At only eight minutes in length, "The Courtship of the Newt" is almost like an introduction to Benchley's brand of mirth. He attempts to show a live newt to the audience by reaching into a tank of murky water filled with seaweed but to no avail. Utimately he calls on his bored and annoyed assistant sitting by his side to scoop up the newt for view on the big screen. Though no newt is visible, a big splash is heard when Benchley drops the newt back into the tank. Diagrams are utilized as with most "educational" talks, but Benchley's drawings are very different from what one might expect from such a lecture, with an out-of-place drawing always popping up to befuddle and confuse both the speaker and the audience.

Courtship of the Newt, The (1938)

* (out of 4)

Robert Benchley has turned in some very funny shorts and some not so funny shorts and sadly this one here is quite painful to sit through. He plays a rather dimwitted zoology professor who talks about the mysterious "newt" creature and why we the viewer should be interested in it. Benchley has an extremely dry humor to him, which can be quite funny with the right material but I must admit that I was ready to pull out my eyes a few minutes into this 8-minute short. I've never seen a truly horrid short as the small running time doesn't leave the viewer to have to sit and torture himself for too long butt his one here came close to being one of the worst I've seen. What we basically have is Benchley acting as if he doesn't know what he's talking about and talking about items that just aren't interesting. The type of humor includes a drawing of the "newt" on a chalkboard when Benchley comes back with the "photo" doesn't look too good. Not very funny. The entire running joke is that he's teaching us about this creature yet nothing he says makes any sense so in the end, we really don't learn anything. That's the entire joke of the film but it's not funny.