On Screen

...at other times, these very effects become obstreperously self-conscious...

...and what they are in life is normal rather than sub- or abnormal...

...And then, of course, comes the cop-out...

...These two lead him to a viciously Weathermannish girl lizard, with whom he blows up a power plant, only to end in a hospital visited by three girls whom he balled at the orgy...

...When Dick rightly suspects his wife of infidelity and tells Allan that words she spoke in her sleep betrayed her as dreaming of intercourse with another man, and the trembling Allan inquires whether she mentioned any names, Dick replies, "No??only yours...

...Or, more exactly, cultural humor...

...For her, I'd sell my grandmother to the Arabs !"??i.e., making himself out to be a sissified grandma's boy who would still sell his beloved granny to the tribal enemy??in short, anti-Semitism...

...and against the status quo, which I shall call con-humor...

...To the extent that it believes the world susceptible of improvement, it may be satire of a socially or politically activist sort...

...Allan's schnookiness cries out from every frame of the film, and out of just about every gag...

...Remotely based on some R. Crumb comic strips, the tale concerns Fritz, a tiger cat who drops out of NYU and burns his classrooms behind him, goes on a polymorphous orgy (e.g., a cat with an aardvark), is chased by the police (literally pigs) through a service in a synagogue all the way to Harlem, and there starts a black revolution that ends in catastrophe...

...It's a ragged hope, but at least Fritz the Cat does not preach love for the schnooks...

...yet the principal characters are funny because they are bigger than in real life, not smaller...

...we observe him only in his all-consuming avocation, women, where he is not even a resounding failure...

...Labor, youth, radicals, reactionaries??all emerge as screw-ups...

...actually it is very soft stuff, all right in its way, but not when it is also masochistic to the last degree, and so unwholesome and distasteful...

...Typically, when Allan spots a girl for whom he is seized with instant lust, he'll either blurt out, "I love you ! I want to have your baby...

...Play It Again, Sam, which Woody Allen adapted from his own stage play and stars in, under Herbert Ross' direction, might appear on the surface a somewhat biting??let's call it snapping??comedy...

...admirably named Winston Schwartz, and they start driving west together...

...or (my quotes are only approximations: I didn't have a pen with me) "She's gorgeous...

...Con-humor, on the other hand, is humor on the warpath, humor that would change the world, if only it could be changed...

...It is also, with differences more seeming than real, what operates in Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam...

...Linda, a former model, is loved but neglected, and has become a confirmed tranquilizer-swallower, though in this department she is way behind the supreme hypochondriac, analy-sand, pill-popper and hard-luck case, Allan...

...But what has happened...

...and that of his absent wife, sneering at his sexual incompetence...

...You find this sort of thing in Swift and, although disguised, in The Importance of Being Earnest, in Dr...

...In the end, the laugh that should take the sting off the hurt becomes a curse in its own right, and the cure may prove as deadly as the poison whose antidote it means to be...

...French, British and Austrian humor, though subtly different under the microscope, are similar to the naked eye: the sophisticated wit of formerly mighty empires and monarchies fallen on lean years, still dressed in understated elegance despite a patched elbow or a slightly threadbare trouser seat that are themselves good for a cavalier joke or two...

...But Viva, Andy Warhol's ex-superstar, can make a two-minute bit histrionically and visually stomach-turning...

...There is, I firmly believe, such a thing as national humor...

...Mankind is so many frantic animals whose only human parts are their insatiable genitalia...

...Allan Felix??that happy last name is itself an irony??is a nervous wreck...

...and Susan Anspach manages to be boring even in the short part of the wife...

...Significantly, we do not see him at his job, where he is an ostensible success...

...if it has given up all hope for progress, it may be pure cynicism or black humor??partial vengeance on a world whose stupidity and uned-ucability deserves nothing better, and nothing less, than comic devastation...

...Tony Roberts is coarse and dreary as Dick...

...Diane Keaton is homely and untalented as Linda...

...i.e., total reversal of roles, abdication of virility, masochism...

...But before we get to that absurd, mendacious finale, we see Allan continually beset by two imaginary presences: that of Humphrey Bogart, urging him on to ruthless conquests of women...

...yet so debased is our film criticism that she copped numerous plaudits...

...The movie begins with the closing abdication scene from Casablanca reproduced in toto, and ends with a takeoff on it: Linda and Allan simultaneously give each other up as she leaves for Cleveland with Dick, while Allan bids Bogey goodbye forever, having come of age sexually...

...At last, the grass-widowed Librium-addict Linda falls into the arms of the abandoned Darvol-buff Allan, and, by way of a final cop-out, this pitiful one-night stand rejuvenates Linda's marriage and makes a man of Allan...

...Like a mummy returning to life, he sheds his bandages and the orgy resumes...

...Jerry Lacy's impersonation of Bogart is as amateurish as it was on stage...

...The only interesting thing about it, in fact, is that it is, despite its fundamental pro-humor quality, surprisingly unhealthy...

...In Feydeau, a faithful but neglected wife toys with adultery, and is devastatingly funny in the brilliance of her toying as well as in her hairbreadth escapes...

...in despair, he turns to his only friends, Dick and Linda, a semihappily married couple...

...Pro-humor looks affectionately at the established order that, despite gentle ribbing, it would forever conserve...

...American humor, in contrast, is preeminently based on feeling superior to someone even more inept than oneself, or on making more or less harmless jokes about one's own blunders...

...His ex-waitress wife, Nancy, has just left him...

...The only hope is in the survival of lechery and laughter??indeed, Fritz is an updated Mehitabel in tomcat's clothing...

...For our hero is a nebbish, a schnook and a schlemiel, and the fact that he is Jewish in the film (and, as Allen rather than Allan, in life too) is as significant as the fact that only Yiddish possesses sufficient mots justes for describing him...

...Such humor is to be found, for example, in Life with Father, Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear, A Comedy of Errors, or, to descend a few thousand degrees, in What's Up, Doc...

...Midway they prove incompatible, and he wanders off into the desert to get involved with a Hell's-Angels jack rabbit and his kinky horse girl friend...

...Thus both her intrigues and her ultimate chastity will be funny for being bigger, cleverer and, finally, more chaste than life??not like Linda's and Allan's, more piddling, inept and pitiable than reality...

...Bakshi's drawing is sometimes quite artistic and imaginative in its three-dimensionality, subsuming of photographed sequences, surreal effects, and far-out transitions between episodes...

...Strangelove and Endgame, and again, in much more modest and erratic form, in Ralph Bakshi's X-rated cartoon feature, Fritz the Cat...

...Feydeau, too, concentrates on sex in general, and adultery in particular...

...It may consider things slightly preposterous, and to that extent it wants to laugh them into harmlessness and acceptability...

...How horribly this sort of humor contrasts with that of, say, a Feydeau farce...

...Dick is a nonstop wheeler-dealer, one ear permanently buried in a telephone, instead of, as his wife would prefer, cut off as a Van Goghian love offering to her...

...From this indigenous American humor??itself based on feeling, rightly or wrongly, inferior to European culture??it is only a step to Jewish humor, the humor of unjustly hounded people who try to laugh at their miseries, or even exaggerate them for the benefit of their benevolent persecutors, the friendly anti-Semites, and who are thus imperceptibly drawn into self-caricature?¬self-hatred, self-abasement, masochism...

...And when, quasi-miracu-lously, Allan manages to make it with Linda??the Pepto-Bismol having, as she says, helped??he gushes with stud's pride: "I didn't have to get up once to consult the manual...

...It concerns Allan Felix, an apparently successful magazine movie critic (in San Francisco, in the film...

...So it was with almost all American stand-up comics, pre- and post-Lenny Bruce, whose reasonably or unreasonably natty jackets could not quite disguise the baggy pants...

...These definitions are prompted by the simultaneous appearance of Play It Again, Sam and Fritz the Cat...

...The film is sardonically insulting to everyone: blacks are depicted as ludicrous crows, Jews as bearded blitherers, police as porkers...

...Fritz joins up with a swinging, liberated young woman (a bitch...

...She cannot even play herself on screen...

...Two whiny neurosis-breeding hypochondriacs have just barely brought off a night together, on the strength of which both are supposed to make out all right...

...Sensing in advance that his dates will not end with a bang, he generally begins them with a whimper...

...Allan, plainly, is beneath suspicion...

...but basically it finds them foolishly likable, and would just as soon enshrine them in perpetuity...

...Fritz the Cat is often sophomoric, and for every funny invention in it there must be two that are arty or recherche...

...in the play, more appositely, in New York) living in an affluence more compatible with admen...

...The film deals with Dick and Linda's efforts to set up Allan with various blind dates that all turn into blinding disasters...