Word: joking
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...novel, it is certainly the greatest closet nightclub act of our time. In sketch after sketch, Roth cuts into the family and sex life of a Jewish neurotic until funny bone and inflamed nerve ending become indistinguishable. "I'm caught in the middle of a Jewish joke," cries Alexander Portnoy to his psychoanalyst, "and it isn't funny...
...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...
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...
...just that she never recovered from Myra Breckinridge, but Raquel tosses out lines like "There aren't any hard women, only soft men" that are the sort that Miss West used to dispense. She, however, had a shrewd sense of self-parody. Raquel doesn't get the joke...
...simply could not make a joke like that today and expect a laugh. Humor, like so much else, has been overwhelmed by events. A witticism has its moments; a context, a gesture, a silence present themselves and move on. So it is not too disappointing to find that many of Kaufman's best lines have gone flat, despite Howard Teichmann's efforts to freshen them. In 1952 Teichmann collaborated with Kaufman in the writing of one of Kaufman's last plays, The Solid Gold Cadillac. He was late in a line of distinguished collaborators who included Marc...