Woody Allen

What Carver, Borges and Woody Allen all have in common

That Mere Anarchy is Woody Allen’s first prose collection in 25 years would be reason enough to put it into some kind of context. But there’s another, larger reason: In that quarter-century, Allen, like Jerry Lewis before him, has fallen from national touchstone to knee-jerk punch line for middlebrow comedians, though we would have to sift through tens of thousands of Dane Cooks and Dennis Millers to find one true innovator the caliber of Lewis or Allen.

Allen has become the go-to fall guy, even when the subject at hand is miles away and the Allen-bashing must be violently forced, as in Kurt Andersen’s New York Times review of a Doonesbury compilation: “Garry Trudeau has not, thank goodness, fallen victim to Woody Allen Syndrome, neither Stage 1 (trying too desperately to be serious) nor Stage 2 (losing the ability to be funny).”

Dislike of Allen seems to be rooted in either his film persona or his public troubles. Forgetting those externals and concentrating on the page, we find, first of all, a disciple of S.J. Perelman.

Perelman, in a 50-year career that began in the 1920s, wrote countless comic essays and pastiches—“feuilletons,” he called them. He was a verbal surrealist who idolized James Joyce and inspired the nightmare comedies of his likeminded brother-in-law, Nathanael West.

Perelman is all over the title “Sam, You Made the Pants Too Fragrant,” one of Mere Anarchy’s 18 bagatelles. There’s explicit reference to Perelman’s “Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer” in Allen’s “How Deadly Your Taste Buds, My Sweet.” Raymond Chandler, whose rococo tough-guy lines also work as extravagant and imaginative self-parody, is a direct influence on both writers.

Allen, like Perelman, relishes throwing the vitality of Yiddish together with a thesaurus’ worth of pedantry, often in the service of a sincere hatred of the show-biz community (the latter being another trait both men share with Chandler and West).

“This Nib For Hire” has all the Perelman markers, along with the wiseass pop existentialism Allen has staked out as his special territory. In the story, a crass producer with the W.C. fields-worthy name E. Coli Biggs (“If this is as lucrative as my proboscis signals, there’s copious zuzim to be stockpiled”) hires an idealistic, young, “serious” writer, Flanders Mealworm, to novelize a Three Stooges short.

“We are at least free to choose,” wept Curly, the bald one. “Condemned to death but free to choose.” And with that Moe poked his two fingers into Curly’s eyes. ‘Oooh, oooh, oooh,” Curly wailed, “the cosmos is so devoid of any justice.” He stuck an unpeeled banana in Moe’s mouth and shoved it all the way in.

We are informed that Mealworm’s previous book was The Hockfleisch Chronicles, a novel in which the protagonist “travels back in time and hides King George’s wig, thus hastening the Stamp Act.”

Allen excels at titles for non-existent works of bad art. They’re studded throughout Mere Anarchy, and stumbling on them provides the most consistent supply of laughs. Examples: Dry Heaves: A Journal of Opinion; a soap opera called When A Mole Darkens; and the Broadway musical Fun de Siecle, in which Wittgenstein and Alma Mahler sing the love duet “Of Things We Cannot Speak We Must Remain Silent.”