Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen

Woody Allen’s Schlemiel by Menachem Feuer

Menachem Feuer Woody Allen’s Schlemiel From Humble Beginnings to an Abrupt End At the outset of Annie Hall, Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) retells a one-liner that he says could have been told by one of two modern Jews: Sigmund Freud or Groucho Marx. It may be the most often repeated Jewish joke in modern Jewishhistory:“Iwouldneverwanttobelongtoaclubthatwould have someone like me for a member.” Singer explains to his viewing audience that this is “the key joke of my adult life in terms of my relationships with women.” This explanation complicates matters. On the one hand, by retelling the joke, Singer is situating himself in a modern tradition of Diasporic Jews, what Jacob Golomb called Grenzjuden (“marginal Jews”), such as Sigmund Freud and Groucho Marx.1 Like them, Singer is the odd one out. He doesn’t identify with his own people and cannot be fully accepted into a wider society. On the other hand, this explanation seems to be displaced since Singer interprets the joke “in terms of my relationships with women,” that is, sexuality and not his Jewishness (“me”) or society (“the club”). Regardless of his reading, this characterization of Singer as a sexual schlemiel is, in a Freudian sense, a displacement of Jewishness. It is the tip of a larger comic iceberg that, while appearing deceptively common on the surface, is inseparable from a Jewish particularity that lurks below. To be sure, Woody Allen’s humor is often assumed to be synonymous withJewishhumor.ButwhatmakesthisjokeoranyofAllen’sjokes,inprose or film, Jewish? What does the Jewish joke accomplish? These questions are not by any means arbitrary. Jokes, in a postmodern sense, don’t mean, 80 Schlemiel Theory they do. But what does a Jewish as opposed to a non-Jewish joke do? Does it make one the odd one out, or does it confirm that one already is? To understand the paradigm of Jewish humor and see if it applies to Woody Allen’s work, the case for non-Jewish humor must first be made. It can be made in modern terms, namely, with respect to the claim made by the nineteenth-century thinker Friedrich Schiller that “life is serious; art is lighthearted.”2 According to Theodor Adorno, what Schiller means by art is comedy. Following Adorno’s lead, Schiller’s expression should be translated as follows: life is serious; comedy is lighthearted. Thus, the goal of lighthearted comedy is freedom from the weight of necessity (“life”).3 Comedy, so to speak, takes the sting out of life (necessity) and grants its hearer and teller freedom from life. When he associates lightheartedness with “urban freedom,” Adorno further suggests that this goal is modern. Søren Kierkegaard,who read and admiredSchiller’swork,alsoarguedthat the modern poet (“the master of irony”) is truly free.4 This association implies that Schiller’s claim about comedy is not confined to the context of nineteenth-century German Romanticism; it is generally modern.5 For Adorno, this claim to aesthetic freedom is quintessentially modern since it posits that comedy, like modernity, renounces everything (necessity, philosophy, theology, and even politics) in the name of freedom. Jewish humor is entirely different. It doesn’t look to negate necessity in the name of freedom so much as to disclose the tension between them. It has learned the lessons of history that, unfortunately, have often wounded many Jewish hopes and aspirations for freedom and redemption. Given its deep experience and memory of suffering and disappointment, Jewish humor, while lightening the load somewhat and looking to affirm Jewish survival despite it all, cannot pretend to be free of history and necessity. Its ironies retain the weight of wounded hope rather than the lightheartedness offreedom.Jewishironyrememberssufferingandevilwhileatthesametime remembering that the Jews are still here and, hopefully, are on the way to something better. It remembers that the world is, as they say in Yiddish, tsebrokhener (broken).Jewishironyalsoremembersthattheworldcanbefixed and that justice will have its day, somehow. Both memories are in conflict. Jewish hope, while foolish, is wounded by reality, memory, and suffering. The character that best exemplifies the wounded hope of Jewish humor is the schlemiel. The schlemiel (traditional male) foolishly thinks he is Feuer•Woody Allen’s Schlemiel 81 doing good and accomplishing something in the world while the viewer/ reader sees that he is mistaken. The schlemiel’s deeds, thoughts, or words, while well intentioned, are not affective. The schlemiel—often called a “man-child”—reminds the reader/viewer that...