According to Peter Benchley's editor Tom Congdon, the first draft of Jaws started out on "the wrong track" by aiming for a comic tone. Perhaps Benchley felt an obligation to carry on the family tradition. His grandfather Robert Benchley made a successful career out of a dry metropolitan sense of humour without even seeming to try very hard. He was part of the Algonquin Round Table, whose members included Dorothy Parker, George S Kaufman, and Harold Ross. Ross was the famed editor of The New Yorker - required reading for sophisticated city dwellers - and Benchley's pieces in that magazine made his name. He dabbled in a film career, appearing in among other things Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, and produced a series of spoof How To ... shorts, one of which (How To Sleep) won an Academy Award. His humour was self-deprecating, rather gentle and eminently quotable:
'Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.'
'There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't.'
'I do most of my work sitting down; that's where I shine.'
'I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things, and I have succeeded fairly well.'
He liked to present himself as being slightly befuddled by the sophisticated circles in which he moved. On visiting Venice for the first time, he sent a telegram to Harold Ross that read: 'Streets full of water. Please advise.'
His son Nathaniel followed in his footsteps and became a professional author. He wrote books for children, a biography of his father, and a number of novels - the most famous of which is the gentle Cold War satire The Off-Islanders. He served in the U.S Navy during the Second World War and, had the USS Indianapolis not "delivered the bomb" and helped end the conflict, he would most likely have seen action in the Pacific. He survived the war and lived to see his son Peter's success with Jaws, even suggesting a title - Who's That Noshin' On My Laig? -when the book was in manuscript form.
With such a pedigree, it's not surprising that the third writer in the family should try his hand at comedy. The instincts of his editor -'humour isn't the proper vehicle for a great thriller' - were probably right, but it seems that by steering Benchley away from the comic, Congdon succeeded in draining any residual humour from the book. In contrast, the movie makes its audience laugh and scream. As Pauline Kael - film critic of The New Yorker - rightly observed in her review, it is 'one of the most cheerfully perverse scare movies ever made.'
