Comic Theatre of the Absurd? The writings of Woody Allen
Occurrenceof the unexpected and the unlikely doesn’t only work for literary genres like horror, and mystery, let alone fantasy and science fiction, but comedy too. Though much of comedy’s effect is from the commonplace represented in a way that evokes humour, sometimes something startlingly incongruous works wonders — a comic ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ where certainties disappear, and the sublime and the ridiculous exist side by side. And Woody Allen is a leading practitioner of that.
Much feted for his quirky films (where he wrote the screenplays too), usually featuring nerdy and neurotic characters, and exploring love, relationships and other facets of the human condition, Heywood ‘ Woody’ Allen (b. 1935) began his career by writing jokes and scripts for stand-up comedians and TV in the 1950s. He then became a stand-up comedian himself, before graduating to plays and then films — but that is another story.
As a writer, he was hugely successful, both in quantity and quality. Inspired by humorists like S J Perelman, his short pieces for various magazines display the same traditional themes of mischievous parody, misadventures, and the frankly ridiculous.
Collections of these, published as ‘Getting Even’ (1971), ‘Without Feathers’ (1975), ‘Side Effects’ (1980) and ‘Mere Anarchy’ (2007) prove that besides his cinematic accomplishments, he also occupies a hallowed place in the annals of humour, besides luminaries like Jerome K Jerome, P G Wodehouse, Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut.
It is a dazzling display of comical literary pyrotechnics, with a wide array of topics and techniques rarely repeated. ‘Getting Even’ opens with ‘The Metterling Lists’ where Allen seeks to explain the fictional philosopher through the first volume of his just published laundry lists — it has to be read to be believed.
‘My Philosophy’ is what he develops when bed-ridden for a month after “my wife, inviting me to sample her very first souffle, accidentally dropped a spoonful of it on my foot, fracturing several small bones”, and includes aphorisms like “Eternal nothingness is OK if you’re dressed for it”.
For chess fans, there is ‘The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers’ or a series of letters between the eponymous characters playing a game over mail, but both suspecting the other is cheating. In one, Gossage tells his friend his move is impossible “bound as we are to rules established by the World Chess Federation and not the New York State Boxing Commission”. Other pieces span psychoanalysts and even Count Dracula.
‘Without Feathers’ is more stylistically diverse, featuring among others ‘Selections from the Allen Notebooks’ (‘Had coffee with Melnick today. He talked to me about his idea of having all government officials dress like hens’), and ‘Explaining Psychic Phenomena” (where topics include a clairvoyant Greek psychic “who could concentrate on a person’s face and force the image to come out on a roll of ordinary Kodak film although he could never seem to get anybody to smile”).