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Bob Newhart Judging Robert Benchley Society Humor Award Finalists



Ten happy humor writers are busy chewing their finger nails, each hoping their essay will tickle the funny bone of one of America's greatest comic geniuses, Bob Newhart, who serves as finalist judge for the 2008 Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor competition.



Newhart, winner of three Grammy awards, a Peabody, an Emmy, and the Mark Twain Prize for Humor, is perhaps the most celebrated comedian, writer, humorist, actor, entertainer and former certified public accountant in show business history. But now he has taken on the difficult and amusing task of selecting the top four winning entries for this year's Robert Benchley Society Awards, a job ably handled for the past two years by Pulitzer Prize winning humorist Dave Barry.



"Really good writing is timeless," Newhart said, speaking of the humorous "persona Benchley created, like the persona Jack Benny created--a man who was very much full of himself, but in a self-deprecating way."



"All entries are read blind. We don't know who wrote the essays until the judging is finished. So the competition entirely merit based," said 2005 Robert Benchley Society Award winner Horace J. Digby, who has returned to help with judging for the past three years.



The 2008 finalists, in alphabetical order, are, Cornelius "Con" Chapman of Weston, MA, Madeleine Begun Kane of Bayside, NY, Jesse Levy of North Hollywood, CA, Eileen Mitchell of Palatine, IL, Joseph Nebus of Jackson, NJ, Brenda Pontiff of Los Angeles, CA, John Thom of Los Angeles, CA, Mike Tuck of Hopkins, MN, Denise G. Weeks of Richardson, TX, and Sharon Elizabeth Wood of Cary, NC.



"We had a delightful time selecting our top ten finalists this year," said Robert Benchley Society chairperson David Trumbull. "It is a true honor to turn the job of selecting the top four essays over to Bob Newhart."



This is Brenda Pontiff's second time in the top ten for the Benchley Society Awards. In 2007 her essay, A Warning Concerning Self-Help Propaganda, made the top ten, and was read by Dave Barry. A former stand-up comic, Pontiff considers Bob Newhart one of her all-time idols. "I sat behind him on a plane once," Pontiff said, "but knowing he is reading my essay is so much better than that!"



Like her heroes Pontiff was drawn to Los Angeles, where she now works as a Hollywood polish/re-writer for feature films, and as a business development consultant for global professional service firms. Pontiff optioned her first screen play in 2007.



Mike Tuck of Hopkins, MN first read Benchley 30 years ago, and immediately knew he'd found his favorite author. Even today, "all who value humor look up to Robert Benchley and wonder, 'How the hell does he make it look so easy'" Tuck said. Tuck has written humor since, as a young man growing up in Minneapolis, he was able to sell a few jokes.



"Knowing Bob Newhart is actually reading something I wrote (even if he barely gets through the first paragraph before he crumples and tosses it) is intimidating," Tuck added



Denise Weeks (a.k.a. Shalanna Collins) a home-grown Texas humorist, novelist, software engineer, pianist, belly dancer, baton twirler, is a National Merit Scholar and graduate of Southern Methodist University. She is a true Robert Benchley lover. One of her hobbies is collecting Robert Benchley first editions.



Her husband first advised her not to get too excited about "this contest thing." But when he learned "Bob Newhart is reading my essay," he forgot his own advice.



Eileen Mitchell of Palatine, Illinois, who previously taught literature and writing at the College of Lake County in Grayslake, Ill., has had a winning year. In addition to making the finals in the Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor, she has been named a winner of the 2008 James Thurber writing competition, and placed second in this year's Will Rogers Writing Contest sponsored by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Her essays have been published in, America's Funniest Humor, and on the web.



Cornelius "Con" Chapman's, a Boston-area attorney, a writer, and author of The Year of the Gerbil, a history of the 1978 Red Sox-Yankees Pennant Race, whose humor appears in Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, and Amazon Shorts, claims that he and Benchley have a lot in common, "if you consider one to be a lot," Chapman said, explaining that both he and Benchley lived in Worcester, Massachusetts, "The Industrial Abrasives Capital of the World."



Los Angeles native John Thom, who lives in Westchester, CA, is an ardent Robert Benchley fan, who threatens that if he doesn't take first place he will put his typewriter up for sale on E-Bay.



Upon learning she made the top ten finalists in this year's Robert Benchley Society Award for Humor competition, Madeleine Begun Kane responded with this limerick, "I can barely maintain my sobriety, 'cause the great Robert Benchley Society, Held a contest and wow, I'm a finalist now. Will I win the top prize High anxiety!"



Kane a satirist and National Society of Newspaper Columnists award winning humorist whose essays are widely published, and whose audio work has appeared on National Public Radio. Her website, madkane.com has been named a top site by USAToday's About.com Maxim magazine, and The Guardian.



Jesse Levy, a New York City transplant to Los Angeles, is a filmmaker, actor, radio disk jockey, writer, director and humorist, who explains, "Essays are tough, especially at 500 words. I wrote my finalist entry in a Benchleyesq frenzy. I was reading a lot of Sweet Old Bob at the time and the influence shows. Benchley has always been my favorite humorist."



Levy is "absolutely thrilled" that Bob Newhart is reading his entry. "To go from being an accountant to being a stand-up comic has always been a dream of mine," Levy said. "I guess I'd better start hitting those accounting books," he added.



Joseph Nebus, of Jackson, NJ, who holds a doctorate in mathematics, and was formerly a teaching fellow in Singapore, was first attracted to Robert Benchley's writing when he kept noticing people like Dave Barry talking about him.



"I truly understood that Benchley was a timeless humorist," Nebus said, "when I had the chance to use one of his jokes - There is no such place as Budapest'' - and drew the same offended response Benchley did from his essay . . . How many people could make the existence of Budapest an ongoing source of comic speculation"



"I am excited to be a finalist for the 2008 Robert Benchley Society contest, out of respect for Robert Benchley's considerable talent, and for the excitement of having something I wrote with the intention of being funny being read by Bob Newhart," Nebus concluded.



Many of America's brightest comic talents including, this year's finalist judge Bob Newhart, Dave Barry, Woody Allen, Steve Martin, Erma Bombeck, Shelly Berman, Jonathan Winters, Richard Pryor, Steve Allen, Russell Baker and Dan Rowan acknowledged Benchley's impact on their work,



Benchley's warm, self-effacing comic writing style made it nearly the template for modern humor essays, said humor writer Ed Tasca. Tasca holds the singular distinction of placing among the top four entries for three consecutive years.



Benchley rose to fame in the 1920s writing for Harvard Lampoon, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Life magazine and as humor columnist for the Hearst newspaper chain. Benchley appeared in more than eighty short films and feature length motion pictures. He is credited, along with Dorothy Parker, with founding the notorious Algonquin Round Table.



Benchley and his colleagues, all members of the famed Algonquin Round Table luncheon group, dominated print media for nearly two decades, creating a new face for American humor.



"The book that most impressed me when I was growing up and influenced my approach to comedy would have been any book by Robert Benchley, or specifically My Ten Years in a Quandary," Newhart said. "I was very much influenced by Robert Benchley."



This year's preliminary judges include, Benchley Society member Dwain Buck, 2005 Benchley Society award winner Horace J. Digby, author of Robert Benchley An Annotated Bibliography Gordon E. Ernst, writer Eileen Forster Keck, puzzle designer Chris Morgan, radio personality Tom Saunders, and Robert Benchley Society chairperson David Trumbull.



The competition is open to amateurs and professionals alike. W. Bruce Cameron, whose book Eight Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter inspired John Ritter's Emmy Award winning television series for ABC/Disney, and who's newest book, Eight Simple Rules for Marrying My Daughter, is now in book stores everywhere, took top Benchley Society Award honors in 2006. Last year's top award went to Daniel Montville of Oak Park, Illinois for his hilarious essay, How to Write a Book.






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