Using Comic Devices to Answer the Ultimate Question: Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers and Woody Allen’s God

Abstract

Using Comic Devices to Answer the Ultimate Question: Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers and Woody Allen’s God Felicia Hardison Londre Sex, Death, and God are three one-act plays by Woody Allen on the three subjects that preoccupy him most.l Sex, death, and God are also important in the work of British dramatist Tom Stoppard, whose plays range from the broad “knickers farce” of Dirty Linen to such pointed statements about the ethics of totalitarianism as Professional Foul and Cahoot’s Macbeth. Both Allen and Stoppard instinctively resort to comedy in handling philosophical concerns about human exist­ ence. Sex has always been spoofed in the theatre, and death has had its share of humorous treatments, but a jocular approach to questions about the nature of God is less commonplace. Therefore, in comparing Allen’s and Stoppard’s use of comic devices to make serious points, I shall concentrate on two plays that feature philosophical discussion of the existence of God: Woody Allen’s God (1975) and Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers (1972). The significant difference between the two dramatists’ ap­ proaches to their plays is that the Woody Allen persona appears in his plays and films, whereas Stoppard consciously avoids a subjective element in his writing. “I am sensitive about self­ revelation. I distrust it. I’ve written very little which could be said to be even remotely autobiographical,” Stoppard said in 1968,2 and he has maintained that attitude in everything he has written since. Loser Take All, Maurice Yacowar’s important study of Woody Allen, includes numerous examples of Allen’s “readiness to use material that traditional comics would consider 346 Felicia Hardison Londré 347 too personal.”3 Beneath this superficial difference of approach lies a surprising congruency. Stoppard’s protagonists, among whom George Moore of Jumpers is typical, share many of the character traits of Allen’s alienated, vulnerable, sometimes mock-heroic schlemiel. George Moore is a prolix intellectual who cannot seem to impose his sense of order on reality. He is sexually alienated from his wife and full of anxieties about her questionable rela­ tionship with another man, about his own image, and about his inability to cope with the rapid changes occurring in modem life. Like Woody Allen’s filmic persona, George is fully cog­ nizant of his own inadequacy, as when he says: “The fact that I cut a ludicrous figure in the academic world is largely due to my aptitude for traducing a complex and logical thesis to a mysticism of staggering banality.”4 The Woody Allen character is not the protagonist of God, although Allen does have a role in the play. In God, the hero is called simply The Actor, and the action occurs on a stage. At the beginning and at the end of God, the Actor complains to a character named The Writer that the play lacks a satis­ factory ending. This circular construction reinforces the meta­ phor of man as actor in repetitive cycles of human existence on the stage of life. Both the Actor and the Writer are aware that they are characters in a play created by Woody Allen. They telephone Woody Allen in the course of the action to check with him about the apparent departure from the script when a girl named Doris Levine comes out of the audience to interact with them on stage. Thus, on one level, Woody Allen, who is heard but not seen, functions as God. (One is reminded of the follow­ ing exchange of dialogue in his film Manhattan: “You think you’re God.” The Woody Allen character replies: “Well, I’ve got to model myself after someone.”) Within Woody Allen’s God is an ancient Greek drama called “The Slave” by the Writer, who plays Hepatitis in his own play. The Actor—Diabetes—plays the title role, and Doris Levine participates in the action as the slave’s girlfriend. Since Hepatitis does rewrites on the script and authorizes the rental of a God machine to improve the ending of his play, he too is a creator at a certain level. Another contender for god-status is Lorenzo Miller, a writer who claims to have created the audience that...