Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…I really don’t know what happened. I guess he just got too successful to need to be funny anymore, or maybe he just got tired of it, which I think happens. And, God bless him, if you get tired of it, you don’t have to keep doing it, then that’s fine, you don’t have to. You don’t have to live up to my expectations, Eddie Murphy. But he was really funny. Now, one of your favorites, if you could tell us what you find of value in him, and that is Robert Benchley. A lot of what he wrote was in the 20s. I was just rereading his essay on New Yorkers versus midwesterners, and who are the true Americans, and I thought it was better than things I might have read last year on the same topic. What is it about Benchley that makes a fair amount of it pretty enduring and influenced you so much? Well, he was radiantly intelligent. This was a very well-educated, cultured man who made a very good living as a critic, and would’ve been able to have a quite successful career as a theater critic or a literary critic.…

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