There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them.

Robert Benchley (1889–1945) was a leading American humorist and critic, associated with the Algonquin Round Table and known for lampooning intellectual pretension and social solemnity. The remark fits his recurring target: earnest “explainers” who dissect jokes as if they were problems to be solved, thereby draining them of pleasure. Benchley wrote during a period when popular humor was increasingly discussed in highbrow venues—reviews, lectures, and academic-style criticism—and he often positioned himself against that kind of over-seriousness. The line reads like a wry aside from his essayistic persona: amused, slightly exasperated, and alert to how analysis can become a substitute for simply enjoying what is funny.

Benchley suggests that humor has a lived, intuitive dimension that resists being reduced to tidy explanations. His jab is not at thoughtful criticism per se, but at the anxious impulse to control humor by rationalizing it—an impulse he attributes to people who don’t naturally respond to it. The second sentence (“It seems to worry them.”) reframes analysis as a symptom: humor unsettles the humorless because it is unpredictable, socially slippery, and often irrational. The quote thus defends humor’s autonomy and hints that over-analysis can be a kind of hostility—turning laughter into an object to be managed rather than shared.