In the movie The Goodbye Girl (1977) starring Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason, Benedict played the stage Director of a production of Richard III in which Richard III was to be portrayed in the play as a stereotypical gay man. He was the patiently-eccentric butler in Dr. Necessiter's Gothic-castle apartment in The Man With Two Brains (1983). When Dr. Hfuhruhurr (Steve Martin) complains loudly that he just learned his wife is a slut, Benedict responds, "Yeah, I've heard this." He was in a short scene in the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (1984), playing Tucker Smitty Brown, the awkward desk clerk who checks in the band. Called a "twisted old fruit" by the band's manager Ian, he replies, "I'm just as God made me, sir." In 1988 he played 'Fairchild', Dudley Moore's butler in the movie Arthur 2: On the Rocks, the sequel to the hit 1981 film Arthur. That same year in the film Cocktail he would play a condescending Business college professor to Tom Cruise's main character. In the 1990 film The Freshman, he would again play a condescending professor, this time an NYU film school professor of Matthew Broderick's main character. He also made an appearance as the incorrectly assumed title character in the 1996 film Waiting for Guffman, another mockumentary involving many of the same Writers and actors as This Is Spinal Tap. He also played Fay's father in the story of "Rumpelstitlkstin" in the Between the Lions episode "Hay Day".