Why did Woody Allen stop making us laugh?
Heard the one about the comedy film-maker who just wasn’t funny any more?
Rod Liddle
The Times of London
Afew weeks ago, bored one evening and with a shortage of Hitler porn to watch on the history channels, I dug out Mel Brooks’s 1968 “classic”, The Producers, and watched that instead – anything for a late-night Adolf-fix. I seemed to remember it contained only one decent laugh. But I had quite forgotten the full panoply of sheer awfulness – the painfully witless jokes telegraphed five minutes in advance; the excruciating, ham-fisted acting; the histrionic gurning and mugging of Brooks himself. And, dear Lord, Gene Wilder. It’s by no means the worst film Brooks has made: check out Spaceballs or History of the World for an evening of perfect mirthlessness. The Producers is one of his best, in fact. Imagine that.
It’s hard to believe, from this vantage point, that in the late 1970s there was a debate in film circles as to who was the better director, Mel Brooks or Woody Allen, with many critics tilted strongly towards Brooks. By 1979, Allen had long escaped the exuberant, anarchic comedy of Bananas and Sleeper and Play It Again, Sam, and seemed determined to make films that (a) were in black and white, and (b) weren’t remotely funny. Interiors, in all its well-mannered, boring gloom, had just been released to decidedly mixed reviews. Brooks, meanwhile, had scored a critical and commercial hit with the genuinely witty Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety – the only Mel Brooks film you could watch today without gouging out your own eyes in misery. The debate was posited as a sort of lifestyle choice. If you opted for Allen, you were middle-class, pretentious, humourless, self-important. A vote for Brooks meant you were sunny side up.
It was a false dichotomy, of course, and a grave insult to Allen, who, in the 1980s, managed for a time to square the circle and direct films that succeeded in being amusing without being that terrible thing, that artifice he had begun actively to despise: comedy. “I had the courage to abandon... just clowning around and the safety of broad comedy,” he remarked, after making the fine Annie Hall in 1977. Would you had been a little more cowardly, some of us thought at the time. But, still, what we got during the 1980s was a succession of delightful films, several of which must count among the best Hollywood movies of the past 50 years: Zelig, Stardust Memories, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanours. Yet with each successive film, the stuff that made you laugh diminished in quantity until, in the end, you weren’t laughing much at all. Later still, the humour was sucked out altogether: we had gone, in less than 20 years, from the hilarious Love and Death to the impenetrably glum Shadows and Fog. But then, Shadows and Fog, that was serious, wasn’t it? You don’t laugh during serious films.
Last weekend, Allen wrote a sweetly self-deprecatory encomium upon the death of his greatest hero, Ingmar Bergman. “Bergman... couldn’t help being entertaining even when all his mind was dramatising the ideas of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard,” he observed. The choice of words suggests that Bergman’s knack of making intellectually complex films watchable was almost accidental; as if the thing that drew the audience in was the Nietzsche and the Kierkegaard stuff, and the entertaining just came along for the ride. Allen so craved high seri-ousness that somewhere along the way, he forgot to be accidentally entertaining at the same time. Somewhere around 1990, I’d reckon. Having worried that he would too often succumb to the easy joke, he stripped out the jokes altogether. It’s a familiar problem for the cleverest of our humorous artists, this throwing out of the baby with the bath water in the hope that they might be taken more seriously, might find true posterity. Mike Leigh and Martin Amis have been similarly afflicted. Hubris, I suppose.
(Continued here.)
Rod Liddle
The Times of London
Afew weeks ago, bored one evening and with a shortage of Hitler porn to watch on the history channels, I dug out Mel Brooks’s 1968 “classic”, The Producers, and watched that instead – anything for a late-night Adolf-fix. I seemed to remember it contained only one decent laugh. But I had quite forgotten the full panoply of sheer awfulness – the painfully witless jokes telegraphed five minutes in advance; the excruciating, ham-fisted acting; the histrionic gurning and mugging of Brooks himself. And, dear Lord, Gene Wilder. It’s by no means the worst film Brooks has made: check out Spaceballs or History of the World for an evening of perfect mirthlessness. The Producers is one of his best, in fact. Imagine that.
It’s hard to believe, from this vantage point, that in the late 1970s there was a debate in film circles as to who was the better director, Mel Brooks or Woody Allen, with many critics tilted strongly towards Brooks. By 1979, Allen had long escaped the exuberant, anarchic comedy of Bananas and Sleeper and Play It Again, Sam, and seemed determined to make films that (a) were in black and white, and (b) weren’t remotely funny. Interiors, in all its well-mannered, boring gloom, had just been released to decidedly mixed reviews. Brooks, meanwhile, had scored a critical and commercial hit with the genuinely witty Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety – the only Mel Brooks film you could watch today without gouging out your own eyes in misery. The debate was posited as a sort of lifestyle choice. If you opted for Allen, you were middle-class, pretentious, humourless, self-important. A vote for Brooks meant you were sunny side up.
It was a false dichotomy, of course, and a grave insult to Allen, who, in the 1980s, managed for a time to square the circle and direct films that succeeded in being amusing without being that terrible thing, that artifice he had begun actively to despise: comedy. “I had the courage to abandon... just clowning around and the safety of broad comedy,” he remarked, after making the fine Annie Hall in 1977. Would you had been a little more cowardly, some of us thought at the time. But, still, what we got during the 1980s was a succession of delightful films, several of which must count among the best Hollywood movies of the past 50 years: Zelig, Stardust Memories, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanours. Yet with each successive film, the stuff that made you laugh diminished in quantity until, in the end, you weren’t laughing much at all. Later still, the humour was sucked out altogether: we had gone, in less than 20 years, from the hilarious Love and Death to the impenetrably glum Shadows and Fog. But then, Shadows and Fog, that was serious, wasn’t it? You don’t laugh during serious films.
Last weekend, Allen wrote a sweetly self-deprecatory encomium upon the death of his greatest hero, Ingmar Bergman. “Bergman... couldn’t help being entertaining even when all his mind was dramatising the ideas of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard,” he observed. The choice of words suggests that Bergman’s knack of making intellectually complex films watchable was almost accidental; as if the thing that drew the audience in was the Nietzsche and the Kierkegaard stuff, and the entertaining just came along for the ride. Allen so craved high seri-ousness that somewhere along the way, he forgot to be accidentally entertaining at the same time. Somewhere around 1990, I’d reckon. Having worried that he would too often succumb to the easy joke, he stripped out the jokes altogether. It’s a familiar problem for the cleverest of our humorous artists, this throwing out of the baby with the bath water in the hope that they might be taken more seriously, might find true posterity. Mike Leigh and Martin Amis have been similarly afflicted. Hubris, I suppose.
(Continued here.)
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