Word: allene
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This ability to merchandise his misery provided Allen's escape from the ghetto. His IQ may have been astronomical, but the figures on his exams at Midwood High School bottomed out below C level. "It was a school for emotionally disturbed teachers," he says. "I failed to make the chess team because of my height." Lines like that fractured Allen Konigsberg's fellow juniors. For laughs-and a few bread crumbs-the class clown sent them on to columnists under an assumed name...
...first printed joke," he recalls, "was in a gossip column. It read: 'Woody Allen says he ate at a restaurant that had O.P.S. prices-over people's salaries.' " Dreadful by any standards, and thus ideal for the likes of Winchell, Ed Sullivan and Earl Wilson, whose columns ate up more material than the gypsy moth caterpillar. Allen placed a dozen lines at a time. Their frequency, if not their quality, caught the notice of a pressagent named Dave Alber, who signed up Woody, then 17, to write japes for other people's credit. "Every day after...
...time he went to work for Caesar, Woody was making $1,500 a week. He had also acquired three new fields to mine for comedy: an apartment, an analyst, and a wife, Harlene Rosen. He was 19, she was 16. The marriage lasted five nettling, unsettling years. Allen learned to deal with melancholy by furnishing it with a punch line. "For a while we pondered whether to take a vacation or get a divorce. We decided that a trip to Bermuda is over in two weeks, but a divorce is something you always have...
Vulgar Parlance. The gag illustrates Allen's reliance on a comic device that is as old as Aristophanes-the principle of inversion or, in more vulgar parlance, the old switcheroo. Woody's divorce joke, in fact, is merely an updated version of a line used by Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. "If I ever get married," drawls Algernon, "I'll certainly try to forget the fact. . . Divorces are made in Heaven." For a time, Allen used so many switches that friends in the trade referred to him as Allen Woody. He carried a sword...
...parties and story conferences, Allen tossed off these lunatic lines in a tone that seemed to blush for its presumption. Only a polished comic, he thought, could do them proper injustice. So Allen's managers, Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe, decided to buff him until he shone. After all, 15% of a writer's salary barely pays the office rent. But 15% of a star...