Mere Anarchy

My first exposure to Woody Allen was his writings. Somewhere I have an old copy of Without Feathers that is held together by masking tape, as if it were unearthed from some peat bog. Back in high school creative writing class, I blatantly copied his style, churning out pale imitations of his sterling comic essays. Mere Anarchy is his fourth such collection, but the first in over twenty years. Many of these pieces first appeared in The New Yorker.

While not as dazzling as Without Feathers, or as literary as some of short stories in Side Effects, his last collection, Mere Anarchy is inspired zaniness, especially for Allen fans. His style remains much the same: combine an obscure academic reference with something banal, such as Friedrich Nietschze's diet book, or "And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly, would certain restaurants still require a jacket?" There's also an unashamed treasure trove of funny names, for both people and businesses, like Fabian Wunch, Flanders Mealworm, and Mengele Realty.

My favorite stories concern the foibles of Manhattan's upperclass: a couple fear that their nanny is writing a tell-all book about them, another couple's child is rejected admittance at a prestigious nursery school (told in the manner of a Russian novel), and my favorite piece is about an epistolary war between the owner of a summer film camp and the father of one of the children, because the child has sold his film for millions and the camp owner wants a cut. There's also a great spoof of The Maltese Falcon, only this time the dingus is a truffle (the "Mandalay Truffle") that is worth millions.

Another great piece is "This Nib For Hire," which has an obscure novelist hired to write a novelization of a Three Stooges movie: "Calmly and for no apparent reason the dark-haired man took the nose of the bald man in his right hand and slowly twisted it in a long, counterclockwise circle. A horrible grinding sound broke the silence of the Great Plains. 'We suffer,' the dark-haired man said, 'O woe to the random violence of human existence.'" Or consider Surprise Rocks Disney Trial, when Mickey Mouse takes the stand in the Michael Eisner-Mike Ovitz trial, and we learn that Goofy went to the Betty Ford Center for a Percodan addiction, and Daffy Duck is a Scientologist.

Some of the stories are a bit lame, recycling gags from Allen's TV writing days, like a dentist who kills people with boring small talk, or a spoof of In Cold Blood concerning criminals who remove the tags from mattresses (has anyone ever found that funny?). However, it's fun just to pick the book and flip to a random page, and find bon mots like, "He...was recently married to an actress in a relationship based not so much on traditional Western ethics as on Hammurabi's Code," or, "Next to him was a young blond woman who might have been considered beautiful if she had not been a dead ringer for Abe Vigoda." Very silly stuff.