Bananas!

I watched Woody Allen's Bananas for the first time all the way through last night. A fan loaned my flatmate Allen's complete films a while ago; we've now seen most (but by no means all) of them, and Bananas has got to be the funniest. The premise, which is "nerdy student (Allen) ends up by mistake as dictator of Central American republic", isn't that original or even that comic (compare Chaplin's The Great Dictator, where it's exploited properly); it's the stream of killer gags that doesn't let up for a single scene. God, even the credit sequence is funny! (It's just graphics and silly music, like the start of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but it's brilliant.) Maybe it's because the humour is more random and surreal than the other films that it succeeds so well; a lot of it feels a bit like Python. For instance, the interpreter who "translates" from English to English for Allen the dictator when he steps off the plane, and who is chased off by two men in white coats wielding butterfly nets; or the black female witness in the court case who claims to be J. Edgar Hoover; or the guy on the jury who's drinking through a straw from a fishbowl. Don't ask why...but it works.

I would love to know when and why surreal humour works. I have a friend whose conversation functions for hours at a time entirely by surreal logic, but he won't tell me how, and I've never been successful in imitating him. You can't just say anything random and make it humorously random, even if you want to. I don't think an idea of "incongruity" or an intention to deflate seriousness would cover it, although a whole lot of Woody Allen does work by shoving together a serious theme (revolution! death! metaphysics! tragedy!) with references to his own, fairly easy-going, frivolous Manhattan lifestyle. (The Greek tragic chorus shimmying around singing musical numbers in Mighty Aphrodite is one of my favourites, but there are lots more jokes like this in his short stories. Some of the best involve philosophical interpretations of food...I won't spoil them; instead you should go out and get a copy of his Collected Prose as it'll probably be the funniest thing you've ever bought.) I hope the specific references he puts in don't mean that the comedy will date. It hasn't lost much over the last two or three decades, but maybe all that means is that our (Anglo-American) cultural reference points haven't changed much in that time. Judging by Plautus and Aristophanes I'm not sure any comedy is eternal anyway; but as Allen might say, neither is a Caesar salad.