Ascione, Lou. “Dead Sharks and Dynamite Ham: The Philosophical Use of Humor in Annie Hall.” Woody Allen and Philosophy (You Mean My Whole Fallacy is Wrong?). Ed. Aeon J. Skoble and Mark T. Conard. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2004. 132-151.

    In his article on Woody Allen’s use of humor in Annie Hall, Ascione touches on some of the major themes of the film and how humor inventively brings the themes into focus on a philosophical level. Ascione introduces Schopenhauer’s theory of humor to display what types of situations are humorous and the ways in which such humorous situations can have strong or weak impacts. He adds to this theory the concept that humor has an entire second level of value aside from being entertaining– a philosophical one which Allen masterfully applies to Annie Hall. Ascione believes that Annie Hall is the prime example of how Woody Allen uses straight humor to achieve both entertaining and philosophical ends. To further explain how Allen achieves this on such a successful level, Ascione discusses such themes as social analysis, the nature of romance, cultural analysis and provincialism and, in each discussion, mentions Allen’s application of humor for philosophical reasons. For instance, humor is a medium for social criticism in such scenes as the scene where Alvy and Annie first spend time together, speaking with their true thoughts on display for the audience through subtitles, suggesting that romantic relationships can often involve some form of deception. Similarly, the relationship between culture and the individual is humorously explored by Allen and by the character Alvy, who cannot seem to control this relationship’s debilitating effect on his relationship with other people, including Annie. The concept that the important questions in life cannot be easily answered is often an underlying one presented by Alvy through his jokes. In general, Allen uses humor to make a critical commentary on social issues and human behavior.

    Ascione’s thesis directly complements the general idea that Annie Hall was such a huge success on both comedic and social levels due to its sophisticated combination of humor and inventive narrative. Through the application of jokes and revolutionary narrative techniques, Allen wisely comments on many of the social truths of the period which very few other people had yet questioned. Thus, audiences could easily, and happily, relate to Annie and Alvy, understand the issues that they faced, and appreciate their romantic relationship and the course that it ran.