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The Timeless Jokes of ‘Annie Hall’

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The conventional Hollywood backstory about the production of Annie Hall is that it was a nightmare of incoherent scenes when it was turned over to film editor Ralph Rosenblum. Somehow the film editor used some scenes as flashbacks to make it all work. More than most of his films, Annie Hall is best understood as a Rosenblum-Brickman-Allen-Keaton co-production.

Annie Hall won several Oscars, including one for Best Picture, in 1977.  More recently, the Writers Guild of America East called it the funniest screenplay ever written, calling it “a sublime intersection between compelling characters, dramatic conflict and great jokes.” If there was a museum of funny bits mining the rich traditions of American Jewish humor, the American Wing would surely want a large handful of lines from the film on display. A person may have to go back to the work of Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, 1937) or Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve, 1941) to find comedies that were verbally this inventive. The Woody Allen-Marshall Brickman script is the rare timeless film that has some of  my friends enacting the old punchline of telling familiar jokes by number; they have become that iconic.

The story centers on Alvy Singer, a sometimes comedian and New York writer.  He has all of the signature Allen tics: worries about his health, the state of his love life, and a fear for the strange lands that exist to the west of the Hudson River.  The script shows has Alvy in a full dither about the American fascination with Hollywood, television, and a host of strange non-Jewish traditions that occupy most of the country. All seem seem alien to his Brooklyn roots. When he meets Annie Hall played by a screen-stealing Diane Keaton, he senses his strong attraction to this unpretentious young woman who represents many of  the things he fears: spontaneity, a degree of self knowledge, and acceptance of her midwestern roots.  Her freshness is played against flashbacks of scenes with previous wives and girlfriends, all caught up in the pseudo-intellectualism of artists and psychoanalysts striving to make their mark in Manhattan.  Allen’s sharp wit turned on creative New Yorkers like himself is a reminder that his targets are wide and varied, and somehow wrapped up with a degree of self-doubt.

Here are a few of favorite set-ups and jokes, even though they lose some of their energy confined to the page:

“There’s an old joke – um… two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know. . . and such small portions.’ Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life – full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.”

In one flashback we see a restless Alvy with his striver wife Robin, in the midst of hosting a party to “names” she wants to get to know. “There’s Henry Drucker. He has a chair in history at Princeton. Oh, and the short man is Hershel Kaminsky. He has a chair in philosophy at Cornell.” When Alvy later invites Robin to their bed away from the guests, she recoils and heads for the door. “There are people out there from the New Yorker magazine! My God, what will they think?!”  But Alvy notes that it’s another evening of “making fake insights with people who work for ‘Dysentery.’” Robin corrects him: it’s the magazine “Commentary.”  And Alvy barely misses a beat: “Oh really? I’d heard Commentary and Dissent had merged to form. . . Dysentery.”

There’s also a scene backstage at a Stevenson rally where he first meets the woman who will become his first wife, Allison (Carol Kane).

“You’re like New York, Jewish, leftwing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings. . .”

He wonders if he’s gone too far. “No, that was wonderful,” her scorn barely concealed. “I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype’  And  Alvy admits to the truth: “Right, I’m a bigot, I know, but for the left.”

In another scene standing in line in a theater lobby he can’t help but overhear a pompous windbag who happens to teach a class at Columbia called TV, media and Culture. When he starts pontificating about the theorist Marshall McLuhan, he breaks the fourth wall to do for all of us what we’d love to attempt for ourselves. He walks over to a lobby poster and produces the real Marshall McLuhan standing behind it and ready to tell the blowhard “you know nothing about my work!”

And then there are the asides that play to Alvy’s mountain of insecurities.  To a close friend he reveals what he fears about outsider’s perceptions of New York City: “Don’t you see? The rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re left wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way, sometimes. And I live here.”

Yet there are reasons he won’t relocate to Hollywood. “They don’t throw their garbage away, they turn it into television shows.”

These days any work by Allen exists under a cloud.  But most of the collaborative arts need a degree of generosity in the process of assessing their worth.  So many things came together  in Annie Hall.

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‘Incitement’ Should Not be Protected Speech

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                                                Safejournalists

We expect Presidents to condemn hate speech, not contribute to it by inciting violent attacks.

Our political and legal institutions are lagging badly in dealing with twenty-first century communication forms that enable acts of violence against others.  The sources of this rhetoric of hate may be politicians of various kinds, nativist groups that have formed online communities, or others using live forums.  All are threats to the nation that we seem ill-prepared to handle.  To add to the challenge, bloodshed motivated by hate has been made worse by a President whose billigerence has placed him in the chain of causes that have led to violence.

No one wants to give ground on protections for Americans to speak and publish at will. The First Amendment is our birthright. Dissent is often a necessary source of influence for needed reforms. The rights of advocates should always have a presumptive position in any discussion that would alter their protections.  Even so, we are facing threats from especially from two quarters that should have the attention of law enforcement officials everywhere.

Incredibly, as we have noted, one source of the problem is the President himself.  We are in a period dominated by unprecedented presidential bullying that a reasonable listener could understand as sanctioning attacks on members of the press and opponents.  This week, when a person in a Trump rally suggested shooting border crossers, Trump simply smiled and laughed it off: further evidence of his stunning moral vacancy.

In 2018 Trump praised a member of the House of Representatives, Greg Gianforte, who assaulted a journalist and knocked him to the floor at his Bozeman Montana office. Trump applauded this aggression at another rally, noting  “any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of — he’s my guy.” It’s part of a larger pattern of sneers and taunts often directed at national journalists who are often separated from a jeering MAGA crowd only by a rope line. Some news organizations have had little choice but to hire protection for their correspondents from mobs fired up by the President. That’s how bad it’s become.

In yet another recent rally Trump talked about reproductive health clinics as if they were in the business of murdering babies. His specific choice of words included “executing babies,” followed by a chopping gesture that we might see in a butcher shop. This kind of talk was apparently enough to motivate at least one man, Matthew Haviland, to threaten kill “every Democrat” and other pro-choice demons he imagined, triggering a rare response from the F.B.I’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.  We expect Presidents to condemn hate speech, not contribute to it by inciting attacks on other Americans.

The second source of this problem is even more ominous because it is also omnipresent. It is hate speech that is easily spread via extremist manifestos online.  Most terrorism experts have given up on the old law enforcement bromide of the “lone wolf” shooter: a characterization that might have once been used to explain gun attacks similar to those on American synagogues in San Diego and Pittsburgh. Now, the more common analysis is that individuals are connected by racist or anti-immigrant websites that still get First Amendment protections.  Apparently even haters have their chat groups.  John Earnest, the attacker in San Diego, was reportedly motivated by online rhetoric from the recent New Zealand mass murderer, who was trying to exterminate Muslims.

Our hands-off approach is producing increasingly dire results. 

Online manifestos functioning as calls to action against “alien” groups are all over the internet, sometimes taken down by individual platforms like Facebook, and sometimes allowed to stand.  Groups may be motivated by anti-semitism, racism, hostility to immigrants and others. The problem is enormous because one platform that might reject content can be replaced by another. There is always an internet server somewhere inside or outside the United States that will host poisonous content.

To be sure, an internet that has turned into what the New York Times has called a “sea of hate” is beyond the easy control of any one nation.  Like most digital media, content easily slips through political boundaries.  Even so, we could be doing more to curb homegrown threats.

Should we Protect Hate Speech that Targets Others?

For the most part, hate speech in the United States is protected.  A 1969 Supreme Court Case, Brandenburg v. Ohio, allows vitriol to exist unless it is likely to incite “imminent lawless action.”  But few federal judges then or now want to prosecute speech on this premise.  There is a long legal tradition to err in favor of the hothead expressing verbal hostility. But this hands-off approach is producing increasingly dire results.  While most Americans would accept the rights of even a Nazi group to march or a group of white supremacists to gather, others might question why incitement is so narrowly defined.  For example, English law allows charges to be brought against a person for “incitement to racial hatred.”  Would our admirable record of tolerance of free speech be significantly harmed by a similar prohibition suggesting a violent response?

Smarter minds than mine need to begin to sort all of this out.  But it appears that our laws and constitutional protections are far behind our technology and the coarsening of our rhetoric.  We now have robust networks for the dissemination of hatred, even while basic norms of civility have withered.