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1973
By RICHARD SCHICKEL
JAN. 7, 1973
I am writing this piece because in a moment of notsocareless rapture I recently reviewed the movie “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex —But Were Afraid to Ask,” and caned its creator, Woody Allen, “the most important comic talent now working in this country.” An editor of this magazine then called up and asked me to defend, if I could, that statement. It is, of course, a heavy burden to place on the slender—if comely—shoulders of a short comedian. Worse, it places me in the unenviable position of writing seriously about humor, a task that has reduced intellects as powerful as Freud, Bergson and Meredith to selfparody, leaving them fit subjects for other parodists. Still ... the phrase flowed so easily from pen to page—no writer's block, no unseemly second thoughts. And, I might add, no dissent from friends or readers. On the contrary, in my rather square circle there was a general nodding of grizzled pates. Nor have I yet found a critical soul my age— turning 90—who offers dissent. As for the general public, merely consider the grosses rung up by Allen's recent films, plays and personal appearances. And let the experience of my friend, David E., a novelist, stand as our concluding unscientific opinion sample. He went out recently to purchase “Getting Even,” a thin volume —thickly priced—of Allen's collected literary work and found himself dipping into it on his way home. The publishers, of course, had neglected to place a warning on the jacket, indicating that it is dangerous and unlawful to read “Getting Even” on the Madison Avenue bus. Inevitably, E. began cackling aloud as he read. When the tears started to run and he was shaking uncontrollably, little old ladies began edging away from him, for all the world as if, in one of Allen's more felicitous phrases, he was engaged “in the transportation of a large whitefish across the state line for immoral purposes.” So much for the question of redeeming social value in Allen's work: With his help you can obtain Lebensraum on a crowded Manhattan bus. How is it, though, that he so effortlessly obtains the helpless acquiescence to his japes that E. exhibited? What is the nature of his uncanny hold on his contemporaries? The answer, I think, is simple, and its proof—forthe writer, anyway—infinitely pleasurable, since it involves burrowing back through personal history and Allen's own routines. Stated simply, it is this: Woody Allen is a walking compendium of a generation's concerns, comically stated. At every stage of his career he has demonstrated himself to be uncannily in touch with the things that are on the minds of the vast majority of his contemporaries. Listening to his public monologues has always given me and mine the peculiar sensation that our own interior monologues have been tapped and are being broadcast. But who are “we”? A good question. You will perhaps remember us from our previous incarnation as “the silent generation,” born in the nineteen thirties, passing through childhood during World War II, coming to what passed for maturity in the Eisenhower years, flaring briefly into idealist concern during the Kennedy moment, falling back into silence—those of us who didn't take to hanging around the counterculture candy store — and remaining unable to join the Nixon landslide because of esthetic principles, the McGovern crusade because of our aversion to toploftiness in politics. Our last true political hero was. Adiai Stevenson, the last — and possibly first—ironist as candidate. At a guess, I'd say most of the notoriously missing voters at the last election were my contemporaries. “Woody Allen c'est moi,” any of us could say. For, indeed, we had been shaped by all that had shaped him—though there was perhaps one important difference, namely, that he had written as an adolescent a great many of the television programs we had watched as adolescents. Though even in this fact there was something of high interest. The magazine profiles inform us—with exces sive casualness — that the shows he wrote ranged from Sid Caesar's to Herb Shriner's. It seems almost impossible that the same fellow could contribute gags to both—the former a legendary finishing school for our most sophisticated showbiz wits (Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon), the latter a repository of sly rube humor. He also did material for the likes of Pat Boone, Garry Moore, Art Carney. Even then, obviously, there was something universal about his talent. He was first observed in public in the small clubs of Greenwich Village in the early nineteensixties, and legend has it that his managers had to push him on stage each night, after a day of prayer and fasting to secure release from the evening's ordeal. It was in those days, no doubt, that he came to know in his heart that God was dead. I happened to catch him by accident one night at The Bitter End—having gone there to see some friends who were breaking in a folk song act—and his uniqueness was obvious even then. We all knew, of course, that being a standup comic was the loneliest job this side of the Presidency, but the tradition was for the comedian to brazen it out, affect a sublime and aggressive selfconfidence — the Henny Youngman syndrome. So just by appearing, bent like a question mark, his delivery hesitant, his eye contact with the audience nonexistent, looking as if he might bolt and run at any minute, he parodied the basic conventions of his art. Then there was his material. Comedians have always told jokes about their povertystricken and cowardly childhoods, their adolescent failures with girls, that sort of thing. And superficially Allen was no different. His neighborhood, he used to say, was so tough the kids stole hubcaps from moving cars; he was so poor that instead of having a pet dog he had a pet ant named Spot; when he was sent to an interdenominational camp he was sadistically beaten by boys of every race, creed and color. Good stuff, but hardly a radical departure, except for—again—Allen's style. Comics had been making jokes about psychiatrists for a long time, too, but he was the first to deliver a routine in exactly the same manner as that of a patient writhing oil a couch, struggling to bring forth hidden memories, dreams, fantasies while the $50anhour meter ticked away. One felt a nudge of recognition. For surely we were the first generation to accept the psychoanalytic metaphor easily, naturally and, above all, youthfully. A lot of us, like Allen, acquired our first shrinks at the time we acquired our first jobs. And, one suspects, for much the same reason, which is that reality failed to match expectations. Allen used to have a routine about the wife of a friend who had orgasm insurance; if her husband failed to provide one she collected from Mutual of Omaha. It was typical of yards and yards of material Allen ran up about sexual failure and, though it was peculiarly suited to a humorist of his stature and appearance (at least two journalists independently arrived at a description of him as “lemurlike”), all of us watching him, no matter what our sizes or shapes, harbored a Woody Allen inside ourselves whenever sexual opportunity presented itself. In the nineteenfifties, you may recall, there was general acquiescence to the proposition that nothing consented to by both sides of the malefemale equation could be considered “wrong,” that “good” sex was everyone's birthright and that it might be attained through mutual, forthright recognition of such “problems” as might exist between a couple, as well as by the employment of certain mechanical adjustments described in many a weighty volume and in the popular journals, too. Practice, of course, turned out to be more difficult—even dangerous—than theory suggested. Large numbers of women, for example, tended in moments of truth to retain a more lively belief in the virtue of virtue than perhaps even they knew they possessed. As for the male, his performance could never measure up to that of the abstract sexual heroes conjured up by sexology and gossip—preternaturally alert, sensitive, tender, dominating. Distracted by a clamorous world, who could bring to the sexual enterprise the singleminded concentration success seemed to demand? Who, indeed, looked the part, or was sufficiently gifted as an actor to play it believably? Objectively surveying the wreckage of sundry “relationships” we more than once glanced into the mirror and saw, staring owlishly back at us, a scrawny, foureyed, unprepossessing figure rationalizing and fantasizing in the manner Allen would, within a few years, perfectly encapsulate. So he was, as they say, right on—about us, about the world as it presented itself to us. But for a long time he was merely one among many, and not necessarily first among them. For the nineteensixties, especially the early nineteensixties, were a very good time for comedy, a time, indeed, that looks better and better in retrospect, and not just because the fog of nostalgia has begun to settle over it. Nichols and May, for example, did something almost unprecedented when they captured in their dialogues the edgy neuroticism of the modern urban couple with their excessive selfawareness, their desperate cultural strivings. The satirical reviews — Second City, The Premise—made a real stylistic breakthrough when they brought the techniques of improvisation out of the method acting classes, where they were much in vogue, and used them to make comedy in public. Mort Sahl was still around, and if his row was harder to hoe, lacking Eisenhower and Nixon to kick around, his political commentary was still something you could laugh at, questions of the higher morality not yet having intruded themselves on our political lives. Then, too, that master mimic Jonathan Winters was making grand fun of Middle American types at a time when that region (or, more properly, that state of mind) was less touchy than it now is. Indeed, Winters, when he was playing off his favorite straight man, Jack Paar, could reach free associational heights almost as dizzying as those attained by Lenny Bruce, who, of course, was still more or less in one piece during the first years of the decade, not yet transformed into the tragic culture victim he, alas, became. Looking back, it's apparent that what all these people had was an unprecedented literacy. There had been comedians before them who were obviously wellread (Fred Allen and Henry Morgan spring to mind). But the link between the new people and —to risk a pretentious term —literary modernism was (or at least now seems to be) particularly obvious. It was more than a matter of psychological awareness or the existential viewpoint that underlay so much of their work. The key thing was a genuine respect for such literary values as le mot juste, for a certain depth of characterization. Not that any of the new comics would have wanted to employ them, but by the sixties it was socially impossible to use the old racial stereotypes as the basis for humor, and the machinegun spray of oneliners à la Bob Hope, the previously dominant style, was not for them either. In their hesitances and pauses you could feel a Sahl or an Allen groping for just the right phrase; in their endless tinkerings with material that had begun in casual improvisations, you could sense them adjusting their ears, trying to accurately catch the tonalities of their audience, which consisted of the newlyminted college graduates, a constituency so vastly expanded (a result of postwar prosperity, among other factors) as to be virtually a new social phenomenon. None of the new comics attained the kind of mass acceptance older generations of comics did, but the new, welleducated constituency was large enough to support their careers quite handsomely. And somewhat oddly, perhaps, it was Woody Allen, the youngest and—so it once seemed—the least likely of them, who by the end of the decade had established himself most firmly at the center of things, become a force, a presence The ultimate sportscast to be reckoned with almost everywhere one turned. In part this is because his gifts are more varied than those of his competitors'. He doesn't write, direct and star in all his plays and films, but he can if he feels like it. Also, he, is alone and historically unique as a performer because he also has a busy and almost unprecedented literary career, regularly delivering comic essays to The New Yorker and other publications; his writing is of a quality so high it would doubtless be published even if he weren't a showbiz celebrity. (Robert Benchley accomplished a similar feat, but the progression of his career from writing to performing was exactly the opposite of Allen's.) But it is not just his ubiquitousness that has set Allen apart. Beyond their obvious gifts, the most appealing quality of the comedians of the nineteen sixties was the fact that their public personas bore some relationship to their private selves. What we saw might be an exaggeration, but it was clearly not an entirely fictional construct like, say, Jack Benny's stinginess. Nor were there teams of anonymous gag writers mediating the exchange between performer and audience. And this suited us very well, for we may have been the last generation of educated Americans with a strong faith in the value of the singular voice speaking singly; certainly we were the last to number among us a sizable percentage who clung to the traditional American notion that success was most likely to be attained through individual initiative, hard work. Though in our formative years David Riesman had made us aware that “other directedness” was on the rise, the alternative “inner direction” was still available and still being chosen by an influential minority and applauded by all. These points, odd as they may seem in a discussion of a comedian, are important because they have to do with why Allen has not only survived but prospered while others have either dropped out or lost out (or, like Mike Nichols, chosen projects like “Catch22” and “Carnal Knowledge” that in better times would have been fit objects for his own satire). Beyond his sheer talent, Allen alone has conducted his career in the manner we learned, as it were, at (or over) parental knees in the forma tive nineteenforties and fifties. He remains, like so many of us, a prisoner of the work ethic. Profiles speak of him holing up in his study for as many as 15 hours a day, laughing and talking to himself (as Kafka did) as he creates. He works religiously even when he's playing the Las Vegas casinos, causing one manager to inquire of a trailing journalist, “What have we got here, some kinds librarian?” Allen has said, “I like to goof around ... but if I'm not creating something funny after half a day goes by, I start to feel guilty.” And, “I want to keep on growing. There is a tendency among comedians to hit on something the public likes and then just grind it out for the rest of their lives.... I want to write all sorts of things, perhaps a novel when the time comes.” In short, he fits the traditional pattern of the writer — solitary, endlessly driven, endlessly guilty because nothing one writes ever meets expectation's ideal. All writers are Calvinists (and, of course, free enterprisers) and thus closer to the classic American behavioral norms than most other citizens of the modern corporate state. INDEED, it seems to me that this respect for individualism and for effort is what helped Allen surmount the only major crisis of his career. In 1964 he was hired to write and appear in a highbudget, mod comedy called “What's New Pussycat?” It was loaded with stars like Peter O'Toole and Peter Sellers, who at the time had more clout than Allen did, and it was produced by the late Charles Feldman, a producer of the self proclaimed “creative” breed. By the time the stars were finished “improving” their parts and the producer was done “creating”—a process that generally entails spending a lot of money on “production values”—it was impossible to find, under all the incrustations, much that was funny or recognizably a product of Allen's imagination. For reasons that remain obscure, however, the picture made money and, as Allen was quick to admit, that invested him with clout. Untypically, however, Allen did not use his new success to launch similar heavierthanair vehicles, but to undertake much more modest projects over which he could maintain more or less complete creative control TV specials, Broadway shows and, above all, movies. The first of the movies, “What's Up, Tiger Lily?” was, in fact, so modest that it passed very nearly without notice except among his devotees, though it is among his choicer lunacies. It is a cheaply made Japanese travesty of the James Bond genre (when is the last time you saw painted waves in a movie?), its original sound track excised and replaced by one Allen and a group of friends devised. The hero is renamed Phil Moscowitz, “lovable rogue,” and the object he and a bewildering array of allies and enemies (“they kill, they maim, and not only that, they call information for numbers they could easily look up themselves”) pursue is a recipe for egg salad, because “it is written that he who has the best recipe for egg salad shall rule over heaven and earth” There is in any of these Oriental imitations of American genre films a delicious element of unconscious parody, verging on the surreal, and thus there was a matching of visual material with the sensibility of the new soundtrack that seemed near miraculous, perhaps the best example of found art we've “You'd better not mess around with me unless you're completely unashamed of your bodies,” snarls the lovable rogue as he gets the drop on a gaggle of baddies. “Everybody shows up when we have girls to tie up,” sighs the head crook as a couple of dozen henchmen pour through the door when Phil and his shapely assistants are captured and bound. Finally, in the climactic gunfight, Phil turns to the audience for assistance: “If enough of you in the audience believe in fairies my gun will be magically filled with bullets.” We do. It is. And at the time of the film's initial run one left the theater feeling that, as an auteur Allen had begun to find himself. For in fooling around with this ridiculous, throwaway project Allen for the first time tapped that great mother lode of a generation's sensibility—media memory. “Tiger Lily's” immediate reference point was the Bond subgenre, but it was also, in its little way, part of what can only be termed a tradition. Our tradition: some 30 years of slumping farther and farther down on our spines while the great screen before us flickered with uncounted tales of crime and espionage. College may have made us appreciators of literary modernism, but the matinees of childhood maddened us with movies—and were first on the scene. We have known from the start that we mustn't take them seriously. At the same time, of course, we have inescapably taken them seriously. Which has led some into camp. And some to the auteur theory. And a few into satire and parody of these and other film forms—the only intellectually respectable way to resolve the contradictions inherent for us in this subject. “Tiger Lily” must have shown Allen what he could do in this vein; in a way it's his easiest, gooniest picture. But not, of course, his most delicious or subtle stuff. His work thereafter has been shot full of ever more brilliant comment on the heritage that is, shall we say, the mother and father of us all. “Play It Again, Sam,” of course, features Humphrey Bogart in his “Casablanca” trenchcoat as a kind of Dr. Reuben to Woody's —as usual—sexually befuddled central character, and the film version extensively and affectionately uses clips from this most beloved nineteenforties romance. Each of the skits that compose Allen's “adaptation” of the real Dr. Reuben's bestseller, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know etc.” is, in itself, a parody of some film form or other—scifi, medieval romance, madscientist gothic, even an Antonioni existential THAT'S the thing about Allen when he's operating in this area. He does confine himself to the easy targets. “Take the Money and Run” is, to be sure, a fulllength parody of a heist film. But in “Bananas” he takes on Ingmar Bergman (a dreamlike funeral procession of robed and cowled monks solemnly parades through Wall Street only to find itself contending with another similar procession for a parking place) and Sergei Eisenstein (a quick reference, almost a flash cut, to the famous baby carriage bouncing famously down the Odessa Steps in “Potemkin”). On the other hand, he makes no big deal of this. Indeed, the basis of his visual style, like that of his verbal style, is understatement—very often in the form of the practical ques tion intruding on the cosmic speculation. (For example, a recent New Yorker casual begins: “There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?” The same paragraph ends: “Is it true that some men can foresee the future or communicate with ghosts? And after death is it still possible to take showers?”) These, then, are his two basic tools—parody and the devastating understatement, the latter functioning as a sort of lightning rod, grounding the wild comic flashes of the former, conducting them back to earth, to the absurd reality we share. But they are, in his hands, marvelously versatile tools, and over the last five or six years it has become obvious that there are almost no limits to Allen's subjects. In “Getting Even” alone he has parodied, to name just a few of his victims, Albert Speer, Kafka scholarship, mass magazine journalism, Dostoevski, Hemingway, hardguy detective story writ ers, college catalogue writers, Che Guevara and the disciples of famous psychiatrists who take it upon themselves to publish their diaries. He has even dared to parody that master parodist, S. J. Perelman. Moreover, in the course of these cheerful assaults he has managed to attack, in his oblique way, such major issues as mortality (“It is impossible to experience one's own death objectively and still carry a tune”), organized crime (Mafiosi “usually can be recognized by their large cufflinks and their failure to stop eating when the man sitting next to them is hit by a falling anvil”), the revolutionary mind (“While he believes free elections are essential he prefers to wait until the people are a bit more educated. ... Until then he has improvised a workable system of government based on divine monarchy ...”), religion (“I don't believe in the afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear”). By these quotations I don't mean to suggest that Allen's reputation must stand or fall on his oneliners. It is true that, excepting “Play It Again, Sam,” his plays and movies are a bit raggletaggle in organization, but then, what isn't these days, given the widespread belief that Donald Barthelme was right when he called the collage the basic art form of our time. On the other hand, a good many of the piéces in “Getting Even” are quite brilliantly worked out. “Death Knocks,” for instance, takes off from Bergman's “The Seventh Seal,” where the knight plays chess against death, the stake being his life. Here, the game has become gin rummy, the knight a garment manufacturer, anxious to live because he has just merged with Modiste Originals, Death an amiable screwup who manages to lose the game (“I knew I shouldn't have thrown that nine. Damn it”). The characters, however, are beautifully worked out; the playlet in which they appear is sturdily wellmade. The privateeye parody is similarly gorgeous, because Lupowitz, the detective, is hired The ultimate erotic film not to find an ordinary murderer but the person or persons unknown who killed God. He comes under suspicion himself (“Everybody down at headquarters knows how you feel about Jaspers”), obtains his key clue from the Pope, who is discovered in an Italian restaurant in Newark where he is observed to bear a curious, apt resemblance to The Godfather (“Would you like some fettucine?” “No thanks, Holiness. But you go ahead”). In the end the murder is pinned on Lupowitz's client who turns out not to be the philosophy student she pretended to be, but a dedicated scientist, a fanatical rationalist. (“You made mincemeat out of Leibnitz, but that wasn't good enough for you because you knew if anybody believed Pascal you were dead, so he had to be gotten rid of too, but that's where you made your mistake, because you trusted Martin Buber.”) What we have in a piece like this is the extension and perfection of Allen's basic joke form. The pop form, pulpy detective fiction, functions throughout as the bringdown does in the one liners, deftly puncturing the satirically inflated philosophical jabber. There is no essential difference between this story and a typical Allen line like, “Not only is God dead, but try getting a plumber on weekends.” Except, of course, that the ability to expand the technique from 12 words to 13 pages is a sign of astonishing growth in skill. We are unused to thinking in such terms about a comedian, which on the whole is a good thing, and it is always possible that—any day now —Allen may reach his limits, though as a true believer in his gift, I find that a difficult notion to accept. Indeed, I'm not certain it would make any difference in his ability to reduce his generational contemporaries to states of lunatic helplessness. The attic of our collective mind is full of the damnedest array of junk and treasure, and a man could rummage around in it for years without running out of comic material. If you look back at that list of the literary sources of Allen's parody, you can find just about every major figure and movement that shaped his generation. Shaped it, but did not press it into a mold. The only worthwhile attempt to define the character and concerns of “our crowd” is by Renata Adler in the introduction to her collection of essays, “Toward a Radical Middle.” Our essence, if it must be reduced to a word, is skepticism. Since we share no ideology and no binding crisis like a war or a depression, we grew up, as Miss Adler says, knowing “what there was of our alienation privately, and not yet as a claim or a group experience.” If there is a truism we unthinkingly share it is a notion that “we are the last custodians of language” because, “lacking slogans, we still have the private ear for distinctions, for words.” It is no accident, then, that so many of us should—without consulting one another (a thing we never do anyway)—choose Allen as comic culture hero. Like him, we have a peculiar sense of our individual worth, a kind of selfishness, really (which may account for his obsessive joking about food; the concern with being comfortably fed is a basic signal of egocentricity). Like him we are not merely apolitical, but in many cases antipolitical, at least partly on the grounds that politics is one of the most constricting metaphors ever embraced by man. Like him, we drew our ideas from “age and culture groups already formed,” so that, as Miss Adler put it, “the idiom of a soap opera is no more foreign to us than ‘The Green Hornet,’ Joseph Conrad, The New York Review of Books, bourbon no less or more our own than marijuana is.” Like him, we find the characteristic quality of eclectic attention to be “a certain humorous remove from our experience,” with media and literature, all intermingled, being one of the largest stores of that experience. And there is no doubt in our mind that an Allen parody of a Bergman or an Antonioni is, like our familiar laughter at it, a proper form of homage. Above all, however, we retain sensibilities which “seem to see the world still in words, as writers, arguers, archivists — even, perhaps even especially, those who do not write.” Truer words than these never having been spoken about my generation, his generation, the rise of Woody Allen seems to me inevitable given the simultaneous rise of his contemporaries in the tastemaking hierarchy. Or, as he himself puts it: “All of literature is a footnote to Faust. I have no idea what I mean by that.” n His weapons: parody and understatement. His victims: Albert Speer, Kafka scholars, Dostoevski, Hemingway, Che Guevara—even S. J. Perelman. On these pages, scenes from Allen's films. The TimesMachine archive viewer is a subscriber-only feature. This article is also available separately as a high-resolution PDF for $3.95. 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[email protected]. A version of this archives appears in print on January 7, 1973, on Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: The basic Woody Allen joke:.
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