Thus Spake Woody Allen

Chester Cheetah wasn’t kidding when he remarked of his life’s work, “It isn’t easy being cheesy.” The proof of the queso is in the dipping, and the gaucho who sticks his chips in Woody Allen’s latest shtick sampler had better keep his bandoliers crossed. If he’s lucky, he’ll get scotch bonnets in the pepper jack; if he’s not, he’ll gag on freeze-dried tomatoes with less zest than a spare-tire huarache — and that can hardly be the sort of gag that Mr. Allen intended.Got the stomach for it? Try “Thus Ate Zarathustra,” one of several of these pieces, which first appeared in the New Yorker:This is a meal for the Superman. Let those who are riddled with angst over high triglycerides and trans fats eat to please their pastor or nutritionist, but the Superman knows that marbleized meat and creamy cheeses with rich desserts and, oh yes, lots of fried stuff is what Dionysus would eat — if it weren’t for his reflux problem.He’s not the only one with a reflux problem. Several sketches in this collection seem like leftovers: perfectly edible, but hardly up to the standards of the master chef. “Surprise Rocks Disney Trial,” in which Mickey Mouse is called to the stand in a shareholder suit against Michael Ovitz, has a terrific bit about Goofy becoming addicted to Percodan after he “parachuted off the Empire State Building with an umbrella and hurt his back.” The rest of it is a stock Hollywood trial with cartoon characters Mad-Libbed in, and could have been the work of an intern at the Onion.It goes without saying that Mr. Allen is a brilliant comic. Much of the fault for his mediocre bits should lie with his editors and publishers. If your goose, depending on its care and feeding, can lay either regular eggs or golden ones, why settle? Presumably because, when you’ve already got name recognition, it’s easier than telling a confirmed legend to start over from scratch. It’s no secret that this carelessness has taken over the literary landscape, with star after star publishing novels an ambitious amateur would keep under embarrassed lock and key.The truly great pieces in this book aren’t among the 10 culled from the New Yorker, which suggests that Mr. Allen has too much integrity to become his own Yes Man. One imagines him second-guessing and reworking his new stuff to perfection, just as the writer Flanders Mealworm does in “This Nib for Hire.” “The dilapidated Ford pulled up before a deserted farmhouse,” writes Mr. Mealworm,” and three men emerged. Calmly and for no apparent reason the dark-haired man took the nose of the bald man and slowly twisted it in a long, counterclockwise circle. A horrible grinding sound broke the silence of the Great Plains. ‘We suffer,’ the dark-haired man said.”Mr. Mealworm has been contracted by the producer E. Coli Biggs to novelize no less a masterpiece than “The Three Stooges.” Mr. Allen transforms this scenario into a profound, metaphysically jarring meditation on life, art, and how best to remove one’s head from an earthenware jug.Similarly sublime effects are achieved in “Calisthenics, Poison Ivy, Final Cut,” an epistolary feud between a Catskills film-camp director and the angry parent he’s gypping out of a $16 million print:[M]y nephew Shlomo … loves to take the negative out of the can and scrape the emulsion off with a penknife. Why? Do I know? I just know he scrapes and he kvells. Not to mention my sister Rose got Lubriderm on reel seven.It’s a bowl of borscht in the face of helicopter parents everywhere, and it doesn’t taste a bit stale.There are two ways to take “Mere Anarchy.” You can worry yourself sick about whether Mr. Allen is getting less funny with age, which many people seem to enjoy doing, though it’s often to emphasize their encyclopedic, quotation mongering familiarity with his earlier material. Or you can enjoy the cream of what he’s cooked up, and be grateful that he’s at it, because even his duds have fantastic lines: “Ben had waited till the killer ran out of fresh mint and was forced to use chopped walnuts, which were traceable by their serial numbers.” It doesn’t take much sleuthing to guess whose kitchen that came from.Mr. Beck, a writer living in Athens, last wrote for these pages on “The Dangerous Book for Boys.”

Thus Spake Woody Allen

Thus Spake Woody Allen

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Hasan Piker’s Mockery of Charlie Kirk Updates Orwell’s ‘Two Minutes Hate’ for the Podcast Era

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Roni Ben-Hur’s Stylish Latin Jazz Entente

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