Mere Anarchy torrent

Category: Humor
Language: English
Keywords: Anarchy Mere
Woody Allen

It’s been 25 years since Woody Allen’s last humor collection, and for lovers of the New Yorker “casual” (a blend of goofy personal essay and literary parody), that’s far too long. Most of these pieces appeared originally in the New Yorker , but there are a handful of originals as well, all of which will please those determined souls who like their humor distinctly old school (”On a Bad Day You Can See Forever,” a rant about the horrors of rehabbing a condo, begins with the narrator reading Dante and wondering why there is no circle in hell for contractors). The topsy-turvy literary allusions pour from Allen’s pen like bullets from a Gatling gun (an appropriately obscure simile), exposing the intellectual pretensions of a ragtag assortment of Allenesque everymen–endearingly unkempt nebbishes who, despite knowing their Dostoevsky, can’t quite deal with the absurdities of daily life. Take Flanders Mealworm, the unfairly unheralded author of The Hockfleisch Chronicles, who, desperate for cash, agrees 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.” If Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe weren’t exactly what Yeats had in mind when he used the phrase “mere anarchy” in “The Second Coming,” they should have been.