Incongruity and Comicality in Woody Allen's prose

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Without Feathers (1975) is notably one of Woody Allen’s best-known literary work. The collection is composed of eighteen texts, including the plays “Death” and “God”, and pieces written in varied formats (some of them, for instance, parody and transgress the established conventions of the essay, of the documental and of the epistolary genres). The mentioned title is seemingly a cunning and controversial comment on Emily Dickinson’s famous quote “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”, which Allen uses as epigraph for the book. As a matter of fact, Without Feathers extensively delivers Allen’s hopeless and neurotic sense typical of his comic persona. Among the most commented and appreciated stories of the book, we may first cite “The Whore of Mensa”. “The Whore of Mensa” (originally published in The New Yorker, in 1974) is a humorous short story about young, beautiful and intellectual ‘prostitutes’ who, instead of engaging in sexual intercourse, are rather called up to have intellectual discussions with their clients. The story opens with Word Babcock – “a quivering pat of butter” (ALLEN, 1991, p. 51) – entering the office of private detective Kaiser Lupowitz – the narrator of the story – and asking him for help for a peculiar situation. Mr. Babcock says that he, as an intellectual man, sometimes feels lonely, and all he wants is to have a smart conversation with a learned woman, which Flossie – “a madam, with a master's in comparative lit.” (Ibid., p. 52) – can easily arrange for him. The problem is that Word is married, and now Flossie is blackmailing him: if he does not pay her ten thousand dollars, she will report to Carla, Word’s wife, everything he has been doing in the past six months, i.e., having intellectual intercourse with other women. Finally, Kaiser accepts the case. He gives a call to Flossie and asks her to set him up with a girl who could talk about Melville: "I'd like to discuss Melville." "Moby Dick or the shorter novels?" "What's the difference?" "The price. That's all. Symbolism's extra." "What'll it run me?" "Fifty, maybe a hundred for Moby Dick. You want a comparative discussion – Melville and Hawthorne? That could be arranged for a hundred." "The dough's fine," I told her and gave her the number of a room at the Plaza. "You want a blonde or a brunette?" "Surprise me," I said, and hung up. (ALLEN, 1991, p. 53) One hour later, Sherry, the girl sent by Flossie to Kaiser, arrives at the hotel. When Sherry is about to leave and after their having discussed literature, the detective pretends that he wants to have a ‘party’ with two girls explaining Noam Chomsky to
him. Sherry falls into his trap, and Kaiser finally reveals that he is a cop: “I´m fuzz, sugar, and discussing Melville for money is an 802. You can do time.” (Ibid., p. 55) Then, the girl, desperately crying, is forced to conduct Kaiser to Flossie. According to Sherry, Flossie manages her illegal business in the back of the Hunter College Book Store. Kaiser goes there, and behind a secret wall of books, he finds many young and beautiful women reading. Suddenly, someone surprises the detective with a gun. It is Flossie (who is actually a man with a woman’s voice, due to an unsuccessful plastic surgery). Rapidly, the detective makes a move and grabs the gun from Flossie. The police arrive and arrest the ‘madam’. Later that night Kaiser looks up Gloria, an old account of his who had graduated cum laude – “The difference was she majored in physical education.” (Ibid., p. 57) As many of the short stories included in Without Feathers, the plot and the language of “The Whore of Mensa” are notably structured on incongruent and nonsensical elements. The very fact that the ‘prostitutes’ alluded in the text are not exactly ‘common prostitutes’, but are rather women paid for engaging in philosophic and literary discussions with ‘intellectually unsatisfied’ men, already puts the reader in confront with a ‘strange’ and ‘unusual’ reality. Besides, not only the plot but also the dialogues, the atypical associations, linguistic choices and especially the images evoked throughout the whole piece result in this inventive, uncommon and extremely comic narration. In fact, as Isabel Ermida (2011, p. 351) shows, “the semantic organisation of [Woody Allen’s] texts, based on a combination of script oppositeness and overlap, is blended with a proficient use of stylistic devices which signal, and enhance, comic incongruity.” Although Ermida is specifically considering Allen’s Mere Anarchy (2007), this general assumption can be also applied to many of the pieces included in Without Feathers. According to Ermida (2011, p. 340), most theories of linguistic humour acknowledge that incongruity is the key to comic effect. By incongruity, Ermida refers to “a discrepancy between two meanings which overlap, and corresponding surprise” that “establishes the humorous nature of an utterance.” Yet, in rhetorical terms, we could even establish an association between the comic incongruity and the conception of trope, traditionally understood “as the figure created by dislodging of a term from its old sense and its previous usage and by transferring a new, improper, or ‘strange’ sense and usage.” (CONTE, 1986, p. 23) Hence, when I suggest that Allen makes use of incongruity as a mechanism to produce comicality, I am trying to argue that the comic effects obtained through his texts are fundamentally related to the overlap, or rather to the dislodging of a known and conventional situation, sign or image into an unusual frame, as it may be attested in the following example:
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Incongruity and Comicality in Woody Allen's prose

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