Call me whatever you want, but I can't stop loving Woody Allen. Why? His brand of humour (middlebrow?), full of people from the literary world, is hard to find anywhere else. That's why.
I loved this piece by PRADEEP SEBASTIAN in The Hindu Literary Supplement. He says on Allen:
"Some critics now see Allen as a middlebrow sensibility masquerading as highbrow. But that's exactly why we like Allen, that's why we relate to him more than any other intellectual comic. This middlebrow sensibility is the strongest connection we have with him. It's baffling why critics valorise the lowbrow and the highbrow while mocking the middlebrow."
"Many of us intellectual, sensitive, arty types are middlebrow in our tastes and middlebrow in our sensibility. Like Allen, we too regard high culture with awe. If we can't drink deeply from it, we want to at least partake of it, want it to rub off on us."
"But often the closest we come to it is a peek at it: surrounding ourselves with Penguin classics we've never read and will probably never get to read — at least not all of them. What we possess is a smattering, a sampling of culture: we seem to know what Kafkaesque means without having read too much of Kafka, and we catch up with the great classics via movie versions of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. This, of course, is a caricature of the cultural aspirations of a middlebrow but that's what Woody Allen is all about. Allen won't be funny if this tension between the middlebrow and highbrow didn't exist."
Read the entire piece here to enjoy the discussion on "The Whore of Mensa" and "The Kugelmas Episode." Not to miss.
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