ROBERT BENCHLEY SOCIETY

Finalists in 2007 Robert Benchley Humor Prize Competition

BOSTON, JULY 21, 2007 -- David Trumbull, Chairman of the Robert Benchley Society is pleased to announce that Dave Barry has chosen the winners of the Third Annual Robert Benchley Humor Prize Competition and congratulates the four writers whose essays best exemplify the humor of Robert Benchley, America writers and actor from the 1920s through 1940s.

The winners are:

The Robert Benchley Society, a not-for-profit organization, was founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 2003. It has since grown to include members in several countries. Information about the Society may be found at www.robertbenchley.org.

Robert Benchley (Grandfather of Peter Benchley who wrote Jaws ) rose to fame as a leading humorist in the 1920s writing for Harvard Lampoon, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, where he shared an office with Dorothy Parker, Life magazine, and as a humor columnist for the Hearst Newspapers. Benchley was also notorious as a member of the Algonquin Round Table. Today's leading humorists, including Dave Barry, Woody Allen, Bob Newhart, Russell Baker, and Steve Martin, gratefully acknowledge Robert Benchley's influence on their work.

Horace J. Digby, the 2005 Robert Benchley Humor Prize says: "I found my first Benchley book in my parents attic. I was eight years old, pretending to be too sick to go to school. I never knew adults wrote books like that. It was love at first sight. I read it over and over. That's when I knew I wanted to be a humor writer when I grew up, just like Robert Benchley."