I always joke, you know, it is a defense mechanism.
 

Woody adds that he first used, devised in fact, this defense mechanism, at school, against bullies. Being the frail kid, wearing the famous glasses, his only weapon would be laughter: making jokes and getting the bullies to laugh. They could no longer be really mean after they had laughed. It is the same when, in films, Woody appears in public. Making a joke is a way to tame the audience.

It is a little revenge on the bullies: they laugh, they mellow, though they might have been ridiculed. They are Woody's friends now. That's the tendentious wit. It even works with Death itself. In Love and Death, when young Boris meets the tall figure clad in a white sheet, he asks whether there are girls after life. Death answers kindly: “You are an interesting young man. I will see you again.”

Growing up, Woody used the same defense not only against the bullies but against death, and disease, and all the dark forces that surround us: the darkness hidden behind the walls of an elevator stuck between two floors, for instance. The defense mechanism has become cosmical. The wit works against the unknown, the uncertainty of the universe itself.

It implies that these dark forces, death, disease, oppression, emptiness, are somehow human, as human as the bullies or an audience that one makes friendly through jokes. In Love and Death, Death is indeed personified and already slightly ridiculed with its too-likely white sheet and famous scythe. In Mighty Aphrodite, various elements of our destiny are incarnated by Greek gods. I wish Woody Allen had given such a costume to the oppression that materializes when an elevator stops, and another to the void below Pascal's plank. It would have been useful.

The point is: the oppression of the four walls, and the emptiness below the cliff, must be able to be humanized if the defense mechanism against bullies can be extended to them. But can they be humanized? Or do they just laugh when they look at our attempts to humanize them?