Why don't you slip out of those wet clothes and into a dry Martini?

Benchley’s line is a compact example of his urbane, cocktail-era wit: it takes the familiar, practical advice offered to someone drenched (“get out of those wet clothes and into something dry”) and replaces the sensible remedy with a sophisticated indulgence. The humor depends on incongruity and on the social world implied by the martini—urban, adult, and lightly decadent—where emotional or physical discomfort is met not with earnest care but with a quip and a drink. It also gently satirizes a certain upper-middle-class reflex to treat life’s minor crises as occasions for conviviality and self-soothing rather than problem-solving.