I've been reading Woody Allen's
I've been reading Woody Allen's Side Effects before bed for the last week or so. There was no master plan that started it. I just got sick of reading about screenwriting before bed and pillaged the small quantity of books that have actually been unpacked for something I hadn't read before. Enter Side Effects, one-third of a three-book Woody Allen set I bought used in 2000 to get Without Feathers. (The reason so few books are unpacked, by the way, is that we've been waiting on new oak bookshelves. They finally arrived about three weeks ago. Last weekend was our second weekend of staining. Next weekend will be the third and final. We should have all our books unpacked by this time next week. Hooray!)
Anyway, what I wanted to observe is that the thing I don't like about so much of Woody Allen's writing is that most of his jokes are absurd departures (and his essays a series of absurd departures) and that's all. Drew Casper, who taught the comedy survey I took at USC, professed (and I'm paraphrasing) that the best comedy is departure or discrepancy as well as being the (il)logical outgrowth of situation, story, language, or what have you.
For example, the phrase "A man walks into a vat of tuna fish" is kind of funny, because it is an absurd departure. On the other hand, the phrase "A man walks into a baróthat's gotta hurt" is an absurd departure that also contains a departure of logic, because the word "bar" has two meanings. Theoretically, the latter is funnier. (It would be funnier in practice, too, if you hadn't already heard it so many times before.)
Anyway, the point is not to attack Woody Allen. The point is that one of the reasons I feel like my own humorous efforts in The Sheep on the Borderlands and more recently in The Village of Omelet: A Space Odyssey are not particularly brilliant is that almost all the comedy in them consists of absurd departures without any great additional strength from (il)logic. The fact of the matter is that the latter is really hard to write. (I should noteóespecially for the benefit of anyone from Steve Jackson Games who's reading thisóthat I do not think Sheep or Omelet are bad. Just that they're not going to be winning prizes for pushing the boundaries of modern humor.)
On the other hand, Woody Allen has done well enough for himself, and lots of people seemed to like Sheep. Also, Munchkin is pretty popular, and I expect Omelet will be a well received addition to the line.
Tuna fish, anyone?
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