Incongruity and Comicality in Woody Allen's prose

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“Well, I heard of this young girl. Eighteen years old. A Yassar student. For a price, she´ll come over and discuss any subject – Proust, Yeats, anthropology. Exchange of ideas. You see what I´m driving at?” “Not exactly.” “I mean, my wife is great, don´t get me wrong. But she won´t discuss Pound with me. Or Eliot. I didn´t know that when I married her. See, I need a woman who´s mentally stimulating, Kaiser. And I´m willing to pay for it. I don´t want an involvement – I want a quick intellectual experience, then I want the girl to leave. Christ, Kaiser, I´m a happily married man.” (ALLEN, 1991, p. 52) In the excerpt above, taken from the first pages of “The Whore of Mensa”, Word is confessing to the detective, in a very dramatic way, the reason why he has been engaging with one of Flossie’s girls. Considering that the customary argument culturally expected from a married man for calling up a prostitute would be related to affective and sexual problems concerning his relationship with his wife, the unusual arguments used by Word to justify his ‘infidelity’ – his need of “a woman who´s mentally stimulating” and of “a quick intellectual experience” – immediately establishes a conflict between expectation and surprise. From this conflict, then, emerge incongruence, nonsense, and ultimately comicality. This same conflict may be clearly seen in other significant passages, such as when Kaiser mentions that the police were already suspecting something involving a group of ‘intellectual prostitutes’, or when the detective visits their ‘brothel’: Red flocked wallpaper and a Victorian décor set the tone. Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. A blonde with a big smile winked at me, nodded toward a room upstairs, and said, “Wallace Stevens, eh?” But it wasn't just intellectual experiences. They were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could “relate without getting close.” For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartók records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack. For one-fifty, you could listen to FM radio with twins. For three bills, you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master's, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine's over Freud's conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing - the perfect evening, for some guys. Nice racket. Great town, New York. (ALLEN, 1991, p. 56-57) Here, too, the cultural expectation is frustrated by an exceptional picture; after all, in a regular context, the conception of what a brothel is would certainly not involve girls reading Penguin Classics, nor a situation in which a Jewish brunette starts a date picking up someone at the Museum and ends with a fake suicide would be considered a probable erotic fantasy.
Actually, in making use of deviations from what is normatively expected by the reader in terms of social, cultural and linguistic conventions, Allen is employing a comic formula already remarked by the Ancient Greek and Latin theorists. Aristotle, for instance, states in his Rhetoric (3.11) that: “Novelties of expression” arise when there is an element of surprise, and (...) the thing turns out contrary to what we were expecting, like the jokes found in comic writers, produced by deceptive alterations in words, and by unexpected words in verse, where the listener anticipates one thing and hears another. (ARISTOTLE apud ERMIDA, 2011, p. 340) And also Cicero in his De Oratore (II, LXIII.255) claims that “when we are expecting to hear a particular phrase, and something different is uttered (...) our own mistake even makes us laugh ourselves.” (Apud ibid.) As we could see from a few examples, there is a great profusion of incongruent dialogues and situations which make up the basis of Allen’s “The Whore of Mensa”. Moreover, this procedure is not only manifested in the content, but also in the structure of the narrative. Considering that the plot of “The Whore of Mensa” is centered on detective Kaiser and on his attempt to solve a particular case, we could finally state that Allen’s story maintains a close bond with the detective fiction genre, characteristic of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe or Arthur Conan Doyle. Once again, however, Allen employs the conventional elements of that fictional genre – the figure of the detective, the ‘victim’, a difficult problem to solve, a ‘risky investigation’, the solution of the case – only for the sake of parodying them, for the circumstances related to Kaiser’s case are motivated by a peculiar and pathetic reason, which in the end, instead of inspiring tension and creating suspense, as it could be expected in a detective story, turns out comic. In order to better examine how the parody of genre functions as a literary procedure in Allen’s prose, we could also make an account of another literary piece included in the book Without Feathers, the one which is entitled “The Early Essays”. As its title already suggests, “The Early Essays” (first published in The New Yorker, in 1973 – one year before the publication of “The Whore of Mensa”) is a piece which consists of the supposed early essays written by Woody Allen. Thus, since it is composed of concise texts written in the format of essays, this particular piece, unlike “The Whore of Mensa”, is not regulated by a plot or by a narrative unity, but instead it depicts a number of pseudo-reflections concerning a variety of themes, as may be attested in the indication forged at the opening of the text:
Page 1 and 2: Incongruity and Comicality in Woody
Page 3: him. Sherry falls into his trap, an
Page 7 and 8: essays has peculiar characteristics
Page 9 and 10: pains. Life is hard for insects. An
Page 11 and 12: pieces and the essay genre. Hence,

Incongruity and Comicality in Woody Allen's prose

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