ZERO GRAVITY

A tired blend of putatively comic stories old and new, and good luck telling them apart.

Once a regular in the New Yorker, from which many of these pieces (the most recent from 2013) are gathered, Allen serves up stories that will make readers long for his Without Feathers heyday. The jokes are thin, the puns obvious and labored unless you crack up at character names such as Al Capon, “a small-time egg baron.” Many stories center on showbiz types, often has-beens struggling to remain relevant or even employed. In that poultry-lashed yarn, for instance, the narrator recounts a “circus geek whose specialty is eating a live chicken” playing before a barnyard of birds, one of whose members, “flapping and squawking uncooperatively, managed to vitiate all pathos.” In one of many creepy moments, Allen’s protagonist describes himself as “a supplicant who has yet to achieve double digits when it comes to bedding the juicy gender,” by way of prelude to a Hollywood carnal encounter featuring “the sleek, white-jacketed Chinese houseboy, Hock Tooey.” A later story hinges on the prospect of an orgy, a bit of shtick fit for 1960s-era Playboy, while another tale that plays on the racist “Confucius Say” trope—see the Chinese houseboy above—is a flat-out embarrassment. The most current reference is to Brad Pitt, who, an impresario hopes, will play opposite to “a hot blond biologist…kind of an Eve Curie but with a great rack” who “wears a tight white lab coat” and “the black bikini underwear she got as a gift from her peers for making the Nobel short list.” One of the book’s rare winning bits involves a man “reincarnated as a lobster” and latching onto Bernie Madoff’s nose. Read the whole thing as an anachronism that belongs on the cutting-room floor circa Love and Death, and you’re on the mark.

Zero gravitas, zero laughs—satisfying only to the most die-hard of Allen fans.