Knocking on Woody
Benny Green Woody Allen and His Comedy Eric Lax (Elm Tree Books, £3.75) In one of Woody Allen's most notorious stage routines, he tells how he shot a moose, strapped it to his car fender and drove home to New York. The moose, however, is not dead, only stunned, and wakes up in time to gatecrash a costume party to which Allen has been invited. At the prizegiving, a couple called the Berkowitzes, dressed in a moose-suit, win first prize; the moose comes second, and in a fit of jealousy, locks antlers with the Berkowitzes, causing Allen to drag him away and strap him back on the car fender. But Allen has taken the Berkowitzes by mistake. The following morning Mr Berkowitz is shot, stuffed and mounted at the New York Athletic Club. The joke, reflects Allen, is on the New York Athletic Club, which does not allow Jewish members. This story, which most collectors of Allen's long-playing albums will be familiar, is recounted in some detail in the first comprehensive study of Allen's comedy, and is a perfect example of Allen's peculiar fusion of lunacy, verbal dexterity and apparently incidental didactic sting-in-thetail.
His career is more unique than the origins of his comedy, for he was a successful writer, at first of one-liners, later of sketches and eventually of full scenarios, Who gradually realised what all comedy Writers eventually come to admit, that the only way they are likely to get a completely sympathetic and intelligent reading of their material is by reading it themselves. The conclusion is commonplace; what is unusual about Allen is that he then proceeded to act upon it, and to emerge in time as one of the few stand-up comedians on whom a passably intelligent man cares to invest any time. It is as though George F. Kaufman had become the star of his own comedies, or, more to the point so far as Allen is concerned, if Groucho Marx and S. J. Perelman had turned out in the end to be one man using two different moustaches.
The extent to which Allen derives from the Groucho-Perelman tradition is debatable but hardly to be denied, although in performance the links are obscured considerably by the fact that while Groucho founded his superlative delivery on a brutal aggression towards the deserving and the undeserving alike, Mrs Claypool as well as Leiutenant Henderson, Allen affects a weak spineless persona to whom disasters accrue. It is only in his written work that we find exactly how close to the wind of Perelman's linguistic lampoons Allen is sailing. Which instantly detaches him from the other stand-up comics with whom he is always being compared. Allen has no more to do with the vaudeville traditions of Bob Hope's juvenilia than with the meretricious Algonquin one-upmanship of the likes of Kaufman. It genuinely surprises me to discover that Allen admires the painfully unfunny grotesqueries of Milton Berle's comedy, and finds depth in the chattery superficialities of Mort Sahl, neither of which gentlemen could compose a convincing Perelemanesque pasquinade if they tried from now on to the end of the century.
That Allen can perform this difficult trick, perhaps better than Perelman could, is perfectly clear from his volume of anthology. Later this year will come the
British publication of his latest book, Without Feathers, in which the duality of
Allen's comedy soon becomes apparent. For the jokes which evoke laughter on stage are by no means the same ones which prompt the reader to laugh out loud. In cabaret or in concert, Allen has at his disposal a whole arsenal of effects whose function is to tell the audience when and where and how to laugh. Vocal inflections, facial expressions, bodily mannerisms, the whole ambience of his strange personality, help to induce laughter. The task is difficult but not all that difficult. But on the printed page, where the comic is present only in his absence, so to speak, where the reader is obliged to provide his own inflections, is invited to orchestrate the language, not as Allen means him to, but as he himself wants to, the job is of a different order altogether. Style after all, is nothing more than inducing in the reader the desired inflections and emphases, and in the comic vein, Allen is as skilful at performing this feat as any humorous writer of the last thirty years.
The sources of his written humour are a resolute philistinism which addresses itself to the task of dismantling the engines of psychology and the more precious literary forms, and a touching persistence in the belief that certain animals, when flung in the lap of humanity, are irresistibly funny. Allen uses animals rather as Lenny Bruce used to use the mechanics of Showbiz; the moose in the Berkowitz story performs the same function as the ten per cent agent's commission which Bruce worked into so many of his anecdotes, to puncture the pretensions of a bogus idea. Without Feathers is positively spattered with references to our four-legged friends:
Mother lay in a coma for months, unable to do anything but sing 'Granada' to an imaginary herring.
. . . Lovborg's drama of lust and jealousy in which Moltvick Dorf, the anchovy trainer, learns of his father's unmentionable disease.
Sometimes Allen will contrive to bring the animals into his attacks on psychoanalysis: Who does not recall the famous incident at Sybil Seretsky's, when her goldfish sang 'I Got Rhythm', a favourite tune of her recently deceased nephew ?
and at others to ridicule the conventions of pulp literature in the best Perelman traditions. Just as Perelman once wrote of an eastern menial who returned the sultan's knife 'with cringing servility in the small of the back', so Allen romances about the sultan 'who died under mysterious circumstances when a hand reached out of a bowl of soup he was eating and strangled him'. Most endearing of all is the ransacking of literary convention to find the promise of slapstick. It will never fail to astonish me that a man who admires Berle and Sahl is capable of this kind of cod-slavonic literary diary entry: 'Should I marry W? Not if she won't tell me the other letters in her name'.
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