Without Feathers – Woody Allen, 1975 ★★★½

Woody the Gag Man, Getting (Somewhat) Serious

Hard to believe, there was a time when Woody Allen could be enjoyed purely as a comic genius. Without Feathers presents him at the zenith of his comedy career, when he was becoming more overtly concerned with what it all meant but not so much that he stopped being playful.

Allen is all over the map in this 1975 collection, most of which first appeared in issues of The New Yorker, Playboy, and The New Republic earlier that decade.

Ballets are described that read suspiciously like Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov only with dancers swallowing barbells and the like.

An essay on civil disobedience notes the impracticality of hunger strikes when the oppressor counters by offering “an exceptionally fine veal cordon bleu.”

A dissertation on newly discovered Biblical verse includes such gems as “The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won’t get much sleep.”

A lot of Without Feathers falls into the category of parody. This includes the two largest pieces here, the plays “Death” and “God.” These are original enough in concept, if strongly reminiscent of the work of Ingmar Bergman and Samuel Beckett, respectively. Allen’s celebrity as a comedy writer being what it was, the two pieces in my first edition copy come with “Caution” warnings alerting the reader that these plays are for your reading pleasure only, and not to be performed without permission secured in writing from the publisher, Random House.

“Particular emphasis is laid on the question of readings,” the warning adds. I had to read this a couple of times before realizing this was not part of the comedy. Obviously the bootleg theatrical circuit was a serious concern for the author at the time. Did he think they’d perform these at high schools?

Elsewhere, you get parodies of everything from detective fiction to 1920s memoirs to Saul Bellow's Herzog in the form of the short story “No Kaddish For Weinstein,” about a man who grew up persecuted for his Jewishness, even by his own parents.

“True, the old man was a member of the synagogue, and his mother, too, but they could never accept the fact that their son was Jewish,” Allen writes.

Allen’s ability to zing you with one-liners is present in nearly every piece here. The result is often more than satisfying yet something of a mixed bag, too, as he’s often writing for effect rather than anything deeper or more involving.

The best pieces here are true gems of short comedy, like a series of letters from Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo written under a concept incorporated under the piece's title: “If The Impressionists Had Been Dentists.”

“I took some dental X-rays this week that I thought were good,” Dr. V notes. “Degas saw them and was critical. He said the composition was bad. All the cavities were bunched in the lower left corner.”

The most hilarious piece by my lights was “God,” one of two short plays that provide centerpieces of the collection. “God” gives Allen a chance to put his playwright hat on and torture conventions to such a silly effect it's hard to imagine such a play ever getting produced.

WRITER: We’re actors in a play and soon we're going to see my play...which is a play within a play. And they’re watching us.

ACTOR: Yes. It's highly metaphysical, isn’t it?

WRITER: Not only is it metaphysical, it’s stupid.

ACTOR: Would you rather be one of them?

The brilliance of “God” is how Allen’s subversive sense of humor playfully tortures the idea of a loving deity, in the form of a play where the playwright, Allen himself, is at best a disinterested non-observer, reached in mid-play by phone and registering little interest in his characters’ confusion.

Woody Allen in the year of Without Feathers' publication, 1975, with Death playing the familiar role of straight man, in his Tolstoy parody Love And Death. Image from www.pastemagazine.com 

Normally Allen’s theological ruminations are fairly reductive and rote in their negativism. Here he finds a brilliant fulcrum to draw out his skepticism, particularly when one of the characters uses his ingenuity to build a “deus ex machina,” basically a trope of ancient theater where a god intervenes to give a play a happy ending. Only this time, the machina doesn’t quite work as planned.

The other play, “Death,” anticipates later Allen with its more serious and brooding quality; in fact it was the basis for a later Allen movie, Shadows And Fog. Here you get a few choice one-liners and an interesting concept about an unknown killer running amok in a large city at night, even if it feels underbaked in parts.

KLEINMAN: Who is he? Did you get a good look at him?

DOCTOR: No, just suddenly, a stab in the back.

KLEINMAN: Too bad he didn’t stab you from the front. You might have seen him.

DOCTOR: I’m dying, Kleinman –

KLEINMAN: It’s nothing personal.

DOCTOR: What kind of stupid thing is that to say?

KLEINMAN: What can I say? I’m only trying to make conversation –

Sometimes, as in an analysis of Irish poetry and the origins of Shakespeare, I sensed Allen just stirring the pot until he thought of something moderately clever to get his laugh and move on. But even these weaker pieces contain moments of brilliance, like the above exchange between Kleinman and the doctor, which more than reward any effort made reading them.

Being that this is a 1970s collection, there is a lot of humor that can be characterized as dated. Often, it’s the then-contemporary angle of the pieces that gets exposed. For example, a piece entitled “The Whore Of Mensa” pokes fun at intellectual pretentiousness with a title character who uses the Hunter College Book Store as a front to pick up customers who crave serious conversation, “symbolism extra.” The essay is replete with jokes that passed their sell-by date long ago. At one point, the book store clerk tells a potential customer they have “a WATS line to Mailer’s house.” Kids, ask your grandparents!

Then there are the jokes that are more cringe-inducing. Even the best pieces have them, like an attractive girl named Doris who shows up in the audience in “God” and gets propositioned by one of the characters.

WEBSTER: [Calling offstage] Can we lower the curtain there? Just for five minutes…(To the audience) Sit there. It’ll be a quickie.

Whatever your take on Allen’s personal life, this kind of icky humor shows up more often than you’d like. There’s a Borsht-belt reflex in many of the jokes that you notice even when you chuckle at the political incorrectness of it. I liked the joke about the female audience member in “God” who is told off by one of the play’s characters that not only is she fictional, but her son’s a homosexual, too.

As a writer, Allen was never more focused on getting the laugh as he was here. He’s less mature in spots than he would be in his later volume, 1980’s Side Effects, where the stories and essays are more thought-out on the whole and the overall result is stronger. But I think Without Feathers, with its emphasis on one-liner-fueled surrealism, will be more immediately appealing to those who think Allen peaked as a filmmaker with Sleeper and Annie Hall, a fair number of moviegoers which happens to include me.

All in all, Without Feathers presents a fine collection showcasing Allen's ability to make you laugh under a variety of different guises. If he’s more than a bit limited by the role of parodist, he nevertheless shows himself a master of that form.