"Good Luck"

Guest Blogger Dept.: Robert Benchley takes a gamble here to write about luck, our conceptions of which we can safely characterize as superstitions. If we’re lucky. Benchley portrait by Gluyas Williams.

                                                                                   

AND NOW they are trying to take away our superstitions from us. First they tax us until it is cheaper not to earn any money at all, then they force us to drink beer, and now they come along and tell us that we mustn't believe that if your nose itches you are going to have company.

I am not a superstitious man myself, but no Columbia University professor is going to sit there and tell me that if an actor (or anybody) whistles in a dressing room it doesn't mean bad luck for the person nearest the door. That's a scientific fact.

Neither will I be told that I must throw out all the little odds and ends of clothing and currency that I have accumulated during the past quarter of a century, each one of which has been certified by the United States Bureau of Standards as a definite good luck piece. I have proved their worth time after time (chiefly by not having had them with me when I had bad luck). I have an old green tie which I have worn so much that it now looks as if I were being led out to be lynched, and has that ever failed me? Never! I may not have always had good luck with it on, but it was because I forgot to wrap this long end around twice while tying it, or because I didn't have the ends even. The tie itself is sure-fire good luck, and I'll let no crack-brained theorist tell me different.

Not being really superstitious, I can look at the thing calmly. When I was a boy I used to have a silly idea that if I could run upstairs two at a time and reach the first landing before the outside door had shut behind me, everything would be all right. (I don't quite know what I meant by "everything will be all right," but I guess that I meant really everything, which was a wild-eyed demand to begin with.) Now that I have reached an age where I am lucky if I barely get inside the outer door before it shuts on me, I see that my youthful idea was sheer superstition. I am under no illusions about superstition when it is superstition.

But some day I am going to put on all my good luck pieces of clothing and carry all my good luck coins and go right out and face the world. And, if I don't get arrested for masquerading as an Indian medicine man, I'll bet I have better luck than that Columbia professor with all his text-book theories.

– Robert Benchley, New York Mirror, (Undated) 1933; reprinted in Chips off the Old Benchley, Harper & Brothers, 1949.