Learning and Laughing about Gender and Sexuality through Humor: The Woody Allen Case

Abstract

Humor is a social phenomenon that tends to relieve stress on an individual level and collectively constitutes a powerful mechanism for disseminating both abstract and real-life knowledge about the human condition. Woody Allen attempts to captivate his audience by bringing both intellectual concepts and real-life scenarios into a comedic crucible utilizing the human instinctual drives for lust, love, and happiness as his major catalysts. Allen's films offer a dialectical approach to the study of human sexuality as good and bad, humorous and dramatic, lustful and emotional, fearful and fearless, fulfilling and frustrating. Although often accused of being an essentialist chauvinist male, Allen may be viewed as a moral social constructionist who deconstructs traditional gender arrangements and reconstructs a feminine and masculine sexual ethos utilizing sexual humor. Throughout the deconstruction and reconstruction process the audience is made aware of the historical, social, and cultural forces that influence human affairs as well as the vicissitudes, ambiguity, and melodramatic nature of human sexuality.

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