Marilyn Fabe Responds

I am grateful for the thoughtful responses I received about my essay, “Woody Allen’s Psychological Slapstick,” which argues that Woody Allen’s comedy grew out of a troubled self as defined and described in the work of Heinz Kohut. Whether the responses reinforced or challenged my ideas, they offered additional insights and enriched my thinking.

Claire Kahane writes that a Kohutian analysis of the emotional roots of Allen’s comedy helps explain the immense popularity of Allen’s schlemiel character even with audiences unfamiliar with Jewish culture because it demonstrates that Allen’s “humor is based on a universally understood condition.” Christine Silverstein reinforces the idea that you don’t have to be Jewish to identify with Allen’s schlemiel characters by relating a story of what happened to her when she was a nurse in training at a Catholic school in Brooklyn. The first time she gave an injection to a real person (as opposed to a “dummy” or an orange), she missed her target and ended up injecting herself, a real-life instance of schlemiel-like self-

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sabotage. She was mortified until she tearfully told her father what happened and he “burst out laughing hysterically.” She writes that she experienced her father’s laughter as healing, “the best medicine” to assuage her feeling of mortification. Suddenly, she was no longer just a humiliated bungler. She was funny! Kahane observes that laughter was healing for Woody Allen too, but in another way. She speculates that the laughter of the audience at Allen’s self-immolating jokes provided Allen with the mirroring esteem that was lacking from his family.

Kahane also calls attention to Allen’s animus, expressed in his comedies, against those who assault his hapless schlemiel, which accords with Freud’s understanding of jokes as sublimated aggression. Greg Bellow expands on the hostile undertones of Allen’s humor when he refers to instances in Allen’s childhood when he would deliberately provoke his mother to hit him in order to make his mother look ridiculous in front of his friends. The angrier she got, the funnier she got. Bellow comments: “Thus, while appearing to be victimized early on, Allen was not only an active partner but the puppet master in what appears to be a sadomasochistic dyad.” Bellow observes that “By laughing when he might have been crying, Allen… humiliated his mother by outwitting her.” Likewise, in his art, “He was subtly humiliating his schlemiel’s adversaries and directing the outcome of a dialog he completely controlled.”

Agreeing with my argument that Woody Allen’s great gift for comedy was fueled by a damaged self, Marian Wiener-Margulies brings up the fascinating question of how Allen’s genius and creativity would have been expressed if he had received good enough nurturing, suggesting that if he had not been emotionally damaged, the world would be bereft of a lot of very funny movies: “His gain would have been our loss.”

Her question brought to mind an interview with Robert E. Kapsis in which Allen actually provides an answer to the question of what he might have achieved if he had had more attuned parents. In the interview, Allen says he believes his parents sabotaged his potential in his childhood because “I was not lead in the right direction.” He deplores the lack of books in his childhood home and the fact that his parents never took him to a play or museum. As a result, he claims, he turned to activities like “show business, magic tricks, and joke telling… trivial, escapist activities… rather than developing whatever natural gifts I had… in a more profound and

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deeper way… I would have been interested in writing novels and serious plays and poetry and things like that” (Robert E. Kapsis, ed., Woody Allen: Interviews, 200-201).

Here Allen suggests that with a better fit between himself and his parents he would have become a serious writer. When Kapsis asks him what he would most like to have become, Allen answers, “a great musician” (201). This desire adds resonance to the scene I discussed in my essay in which a gang of bullies smash Virgil’s cello in Take the Money and Run. Although the cello is a valuable instrument, the gang who accosts Virgil oddly does not want to steal it and pawn it but to destroy it, and by doing so, destroy Virgil’s means of pursuing his musical ambitions. The smashing of Virgil’s cello, like the smashing of his glasses, I argue, is another example of Allen’s making funny the damage to his self he experienced as a child.

But did Allen really experience emotional pain in his childhood which he later made funny in his comedies? Both Jim Anderson and Jack Schwartz call this premise into question. Jim Anderson, in his response entitled “Did Woody Allen’s Troubled Childhood Fuel his Humor”? points to several instances in Allen’s recent memoir Apropos of Nothing (2020)in which Allen himself refutes the idea. He admits that in his early years he neither liked nor trusted people, but says that there was “no reason” for such an attitude because “I came from a large, loving, extended family who were always nice to me.” Allen attributes his sour disposition to his genes: “I was a genetically born louse” (Apropos of Nothing, 5). His explanation for why he turned out to be “nervous, fearful, an emotional wreck… isolated, embittered, impeccably pessimistic” (11) was not because of any childhood problems, but because, at an early age, he learned about mortality, that everyone is going to die, which to him made life meaningless.

Even though Anderson ends up agreeing with my thesis that Allen did suffer from parental failings, even pointing to corroborating evidence of that in Apropos of Nothing, he raises an interesting question: “Why did [Allen] with either conscious or unconscious intent seek to claim that his childhood was healthier than it was?” In other words: Why doesn’t he blame his parents more? Anderson’s plausible answer is that Allen is deeply invested in his dire world view because “If he conceded that his morbid and nervous view is the result of the deficits in his childhood it would be as if he were admitting that his fears are irrational.”

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Paul Elovitz’ view that Allen failed to benefit from over 40 years of psychoanalysis and therapy might have some bearing on Allen’s not acknowledging a connection between his parenting and his neurotic symptoms. “A successful analysis,” he writes, “is based upon the patient’s eventually confronting and working through his/her neurosis, and then changing.” But, Elovitz speculates, because Allen made his living through his “anxious neurotic persona… he, at least unconsciously, never wanted analysis to succeed.” He adds: “[He] didn’t want to give up his bread and butter shtick.”

In answer to Jim’s invitation for me to weigh in on why Allen in his memoir does not openly blame his parents for emotionally damaging him, I would say that he didn’t need to because his rage is sublimated in his comedy. I agree with Elovitz that he may not be consciously aware of roots of his schlemiel’s troubles in his wounded self. In addition, Allen wrote his memoir when he was in his 80s, in a successful marriage, with both of his parents long dead. Maybe time did help him to work through his animus against his parents and at last make peace with his past. Or maybe he thought he would come across as a more attractive person if he stopped his kvetching.

Jack Schwartz’s ideas about Woody Allen are in striking opposition to mine. He does not accept that Allen’s comedy had its origins in pain because he does not believe, mostly from reading Apropos of Nothing, that Allen ever experienced all that much pain growing up. While Paul Elovitz argues that years of psychoanalysis could not cure Woody Allen, Schwartz claims there was nothing wrong with him in the first place. He writes: “Having the most successful artistic career of nearly any American filmmaker, having been loved and loved back by the most beautiful intelligent artistic women in the world, having regularly interfaced with the world’s most renown artists and writers, then to find himself in the most adoring and successful marriage and family life, plus living a posh lifestyle where he regularly plays his clarinet and tennis suggesting if this is not being cured, we should all be so unwell” (221).

Allen turned to comedy, Schwartz argues, not because he was a man in trouble, but because he was good at it. He believes that I have been taken in by Allen’s fabricated myth of the “know-nothing schlemiel” who makes good, despite the psychologically wounding parents. Allen’s real story is that of “a reasonably good looking, athletic, intellectually gifted, capable, talented, self-

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determined, confident, and calculating young artist named Allen Konigsberg who finds success.” He ends his response by saying “it will take more than Kohut to account for the enigma of Woody Allen.”

My main critique of Schwartz’s critique is that his evidence that Allen wasn’t really the neurotic schlemiel he supposedly pretends to be is based, from as far as I can tell, on how Allen presents himself in Apropos of Nothing. If Allen is really trying to perpetuate the myth that he himself is a hapless schlemiel, as Schwartz insists, how does he explain how he (Schwartz) comes to such a rosy conclusion about Allen’s super successful unproblematic life? I would argue that Apropos of Nothing is itself a carefully crafted myth, written by a man who has suffered greatly from the blistering (and I believe unfounded) attacks on his reputation by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow, who projects a funny, self-abnegating, but ultimately ultra successful persona in his memoir to bolster his ego and win back his fans. Will the real myth please stand up?

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