Incongruity and Comicality in Woody Allen's prose

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of these well-known maxims. The true test of maturity is not how old a person is but how he reacts to awakening in the midtown area in his shorts. (…) The thing to remember is that each time of life has its appropriate rewards, whereas when you’re dead it’s hard to find the light switch. The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife – a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave. (…) In short, the best thing to do is behave in a manner befitting one’s age. If you are sixteen or under, try not to go bald. On the other hand, if you are over eighty, it is extremely good form to shuffle down the street clutching a brown paper bag and muttering, “The Kaiser will steal my string.” (ALLEN, 1991, p. 62) This same procedure may be seen in the subsequent essays as well. In “On Frugality” the essayist begins talking about the importance of saving money – “As one goes through life, it is extremely important to conserve founds, and one should never spend money on anything foolish …” –, a type of statement that is thoroughly disseminated in popular wisdom; but then the examples Allen uses to illustrate this opinion are unpredictable, for it is likely to assume that people who would generally utter this kind of thought would not immediately call up these examples: “… like pear nectar or a solid-gold hat.” (Ibid., p. 63) After that, Allen makes a more striking deviation when, through his comic persona’s voice, he starts saying that “Money is not everything” – another commonplace largely professed in Western popular culture – but, having said that, he installs a paradigm by affirming “but it is better than having one’s health,” (Ibid.) insofar as, at least in accordance with the moral standards propagated in Western society, health is considered to be a greater or a preferable value in comparison with money. Further, the argument Allen uses to corroborate this opinion is highly unexpected and it seems totally random, which again produces the effect of incongruence and of comicality in the reader: “After all, one cannot go into a butcher shop and tell the butcher: ‘Look at my suntan, and besides I never catch colds,’ and expect him to hand over any merchandise.” (Ibid.) Then, however, the fictitious essayist accepts that money cannot “buy happiness,” and he illustrates this by alluding to Aesop’s fable on the ant and the grasshopper, which is largely acknowledged to be a story that provides a moral lesson about the virtues of hard work, but he naturally makes an odd intervention in its original ending: Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. Not that it can buy happiness. Take the case of the ant and the grasshopper: The grasshopper played all summer, while the ant worked and saved. When winter came, the grasshopper had nothing, but the ant complained of chest
pains. Life is hard for insects. And don’t think mice are having any fun, either. The point is, we all need a nest egg to fall back on, but not while wearing a good suit. (ALLEN, 1991, p. 63) Taking this same procedure ahead, in the following essay “On Love” Allen also makes use of the major premises which form the basis of some commonplaces, now related to love, and again he subverts their expected conclusions, as may be attested right in the beginning of the text: “Is it better to be the lover or the loved one? Neither, if your cholesterol is over six hundred;” (Ibid.) or in the third paragraph: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Should the beholder have poor eyesight, he can ask the nearest person which girls look good.” (Ibid., p. 64) In a sense, perhaps, it is possible to say that Allen’s comic persona is acting like a sophist here, since he initially makes use of valid or effective arguments, that is, arguments symbolically recognized as truths, or as accepted opinions or beliefs shared by the members of a certain circle of culture; then he concatenates them in a logical structure; and, finally, he ‘deceives’ the reader by inducing what we could call a ‘false’ demonstration or conclusion. This analogy is yet useful if we think of all the incongruent elements, not only in terms of language but also of images and situations which we have analyzed in both Allen’s “The Whore of Mensa” and “The Early Essays”. This technique seemingly attends to comic purposes in Allen’s works, insofar as the reader is presupposed to recognize these deviations as incongruent. The last piece which constitutes Allen’s “The Early Essays” may be considered the most curious one, both in terms of topic and literary treatment. More than the others, “On Tripping Through a Copse and Picking Violets” is considerably dissociated from the canonical essay genre, and the topic itself, already given in the title, rapidly institutes an estrangement, because, contrarily to the others – maybe with the exception of the first essay, “On Seeing a Tree in Summer” – it does not depict, in theory, an issue proper or expected to be dealt with in a traditional essay. Thus, the first questions we could formulate as readers are: What do violets and copses have to do with an essay? What kind of reflection may be developed based on that unusual topic? By doing this, the intrinsic incongruent and nonsensical aspect of this particular essay is made evident right from the start. On the first line of the text, as if the essayist were replying to an objective question made by another person, and without making any introduction to the topic but going straight to his exposition, he remarks: “This is no fun at all, and I would recommend almost any other activity.” (Ibid., p. 64) Then, after giving some suggestions of better activities, such as visiting a sick friend or reading a
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