"You know, if it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. I think that the worst you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."
Woody "Boris" Allen's assertions in Love and Death (1975) are unabashed Russian-enlightenment-one-liners. You know, that classic ilk of comedy.
Sonja rants: "But judgment of any system of phenomena exists in any rational, metaphysical or epistemological contradiction to an abstracted empirical concept such as being, or to be, or to occur in the thing itself, or of the thing itself." Boris sighs: "Yeah, I've said that many times..."
Boris: a) Socrates is a man.(b) All men are mortal.(c) All men are Socrates. That means all men are homosexuals. I'm not a homosexual. Once, some Cossacks whistled at me. I happen to have the kind of body that excites both persuasions.
I don't question his logic or ambition when he took on this 18th Century Russian comedy, as unexpected as it was when it popped onto my radar, though I do wonder whether Woody Allen saw this is a ludicrous challenge to make a comedy of the enlightenment or an obvious choice. He does it with such slight of hand it seems an obvious choice for a comedy.
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