MERE ANARCHY
By Woody Allen
Random House, 160 pages, $21.95

THE INSANITY DEFENSE: THE COMPLETE PROSE
By Woody Allen
Random House, 342 pages, $15.95

Like every other kind of writer, humorists go in and out of fashion. Nobody seems to read Stephen Leacock anymore, and I wonder about Robert Benchley—both are probably too mild for our visceral time—but then why is H. Allen Smith, the Tex Avery of humorists, likewise remanded to dusty stacks?

Meanwhile, the inspired, quietly daffy P.G. Wodehouse is clearly on the ascendancy, with Overlook’s wonderful series of hardcover reissues, new anthologies and an excellent recent biography.

And now, with his first collection of pieces in over 25 years, Woody Allen is reclaiming the attention that his recent movies have done so much to dissipate. Even if you’re a fervent reader of The New Yorker, there’s new material here—the first eight pieces in Mere Anarchy have never been published before.

The new collection also serves as a referendum on S.J. Perelman, the single biggest influence on Mr. Allen’s humor writing, as opposed to his films, which have a slightly dour, social-realist mood largely absent from his stories, which are more or less purely absurd.

Like Perelman, the inspirations in the new collection are primarily genre parody: Raymond Chandler noir, police procedurals or the conflation of high-brow intellect and low-end culture, as in the Friedrich Nietzsche diet book: “Fat itself is a substance or essence of a substance or mode of that essence. The big problem sets in when it accumulates on your hips.”

Like Perelman, a lot of the humor derives from archaic wordplay (“What obtains?”, “If you’ll stop your tergiversating … ”) and references you easily catch if you own a complete set of Black Mask magazine from the 1930’s, or keep constant company with Turner Classic Movies: “The blow caused my middle ear to ring like the Arthur Rank logo …. ”

“Sing, You Sacher Tortes” consists of a lunatic proposing a musical based on the intellectuals of fin de siècle Vienna. The opening takes off from “Fugue for Tinhorns” from Guys and Dolls, as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Adolf Loos sing “Form Follows Function.” Alma Mahler torches “I’d Love to Be Groped by Gropius,” and there’s a great comic number for Freud called “Just Say the First Thing That Comes to Mind.”

Bill Maher thinks his references are hip? No, this is hip: “Down at headquarters, I chatted with Ben Rogers, my mentor and the man who solved the Yuppie Restaurant Murder Case, where the victims were shot and then lightly dusted with lime and fresh mint.”

For writing like this, rhythm is critical—so is the snapper at the end of the sentence: “Just yesterday, after finally filching some measure of lebensraum, I was about to consummate the sacred act of love with my one and only profiterole when your workers picked me up and moved me so they could hang a sconce.”

This is funny, not because of the picture created by the words, but because of the clash of language. “Hang a sconce” has the “K” sound that the two old vaudevillians from The Sunshine Boys insisted was a fail-safe component of laughs. Mr. Allen obviously agrees, because “sconce” shows up a couple of times as a one-word punch line.

Writing this artificial is the literary equivalent of French farce—devilishly difficult to construct, but exhilarating when you pull it off, actively painful when you can’t.

The truly odd thing about this dense layering is that it takes so much time to get right; one or two words can make the difference between flatulence and fulfillment, and it’s a stark contrast with so much of Mr. Allen’s recent work in the movies.

Mostly, for the last 10 years, he’s been making movies that feel dashed off, as if he’s shooting first drafts and can’t be bothered to polish. Sometime after Crimes and Misdemeanors, he stopped injecting complications into his scripts. Sometimes the premise is good—Hollywood Ending (2002), Scoop (2006)—but the premise is all there is. Where are the jokes?

In Mere Anarchy, although there are occasional tinny one-liners that even Henny Youngman would have passed on (“What I do know about physics is that to a man standing on the shore, time passes quicker than to a man on a boat—especially if the man on the boat is with his wife”), the pieces are almost all buffed and trimmed.

And for every hollow line begging for the accent of a rimshot, there’s one that recalls the matchless spiraling madness of the comedian for whom S.J. Perelman used to write—Groucho Marx: “It wasn’t long before Stubbs and Doxy Nash began having a secret affair, although soon she found out about it.”

Mr. Allen’s batting average throughout the new book is very high, probably around .600—excellent when it comes to laughs.

The odd thing about the incessant Perelman homage of Mere Anarchy is that Mr. Allen’s three earlier books, dating from 1971, 1975 and 1980 and newly collected in an anthology titled The Insanity Defense, are all over the place in terms of comic progenitors. There’s Perelmanesque parody and wordplay, but there’s also the hilariously terse takeoff on literary memoirs entitled “A Twenties Memory,” as well as riffs on college course catalogs (“Spring Bulletin”), synopses of goofy ballets—or is it goofy synopses of ballets?—(“A Guide to Some of the Lesser Ballets”) and the faux diary of a Latin American revolutionary (“Viva Vargas!”).

Every piece in Mere Anarchy could have been written before 1970, and that’s an observation, not a criticism. With a few notable exceptions—the late Veronica Geng, Ian Frazier—standards of literate comedy haven’t exactly skyrocketed. The most popular comic substance seems to be flying ejaculate, with the most popular consumer brand being Dave Barry’s glorified booger jokes.

In his early years, Mr. Allen was always bracketed with Mel Brooks, until people pointed out that they had little in common. Actually, they have a lot in common, just very different tones. Mel Brooks is bawdy and exuberant and obsessed with Jews, show business and Nazis, more or less in that order. Woody Allen—at least in his comic essays—is colder but equally obsessed with show business, and adds to the recipe a very specific Jewish joke: the ineffectuality of intellectuals when confronted by harsh reality, cold commerce or both.

In an ideal world, it might be interesting to see what Mr. Allen could do with a slightly more current view of Jewish intellectuals, or even a less fanciful framework. Let’s face it, the names, not to mention the ideas, of Paul Wolfowitz and Gertrude Himmelfarb are ripe for satire.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer.