Under the opening credits of this short comedy we hear a rousing rendition of "Off We Go, Into the Wild Blue Yonder," so perhaps it may come as a surprise to some viewers that after the credits are over we find ourselves looking not at a fleet of jet fighters or a team of heroic pilots but at a plump middle-aged man in a suit, who is peering into a crystal ball with comic intensity. This is humorist Robert Benchley on the verge of launching into one of his familiar nonsense lectures, this time answering written questions on various topics (allegedly) submitted by viewers. The subject matter ranges from the dangers of inflation to the use of elephants in warfare, but happily the questions don't matter at all, for they serve only as springboards for Benchley's patented brand of double-talk. The only wild blue yonder we're heading into is this man's delightfully disordered imagination.
Benchley fans will enjoy this entry in his long-running series, but some may be aware of a more melancholy undercurrent. No News is Good News was one of Benchley's last short comedies, made around the time he ceased writing his magazine pieces, privately complaining to friends that he felt he was repeating himself in his prose and in his screen work, too. In the most literal sense this is demonstrably true, as this film contains a brief passage lifted directly from Benchley's own 1936 comedy How to Vote -- although in fairness it should be added that, when these films were made, no one could have guessed that films made in 1936 and 1943 would one day be shown back-to-back on TV, revealing the repetition. Perhaps Benchley was getting a little tired of the pressure to be funny on demand, but if so it hardly shows in his delivery. In fact, far from being a retread of old material, No News is Good News offers a rather more modern (even Post-Modernist) approach to film comedy, at times inter-cutting Benchley's words with grainy newsreel footage in sharp edits that anticipate the later TV work of Ernie Kovacs and "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In."
At any rate, the main point here is that in this brief entry Mr. Benchley demonstrates he's still got the goods, comedy-wise, and, to paraphrase the man himself, I like to think the main points are the most important ones sometimes, don't you?
