Allen’s comedy shines despite drawings I Woody Allen, comic experi menter in comic forms, has a new book out, Non-Being and Some thingness. It is a selection of strips from his one and a half year old newspaper comic strip "Inside Woody Allen.” Though solid, the strip falls short of being all it could be. The ideas, the jokes, are un adulterated Allen, and so are as jumpy and excellent as the rest of his work in other media. But the drawing of the strips, done by Stuart Hample, is at best meant to be ignored. The figures are so lifeless and their expressions change so little that they sap energy from the punch lines they fail to support. One has to squint at small details of line to make sure the first draw ing of a strip is not just duplicated for each subsequent frame. Perhaps it is supposed to be the ultimate in deadpan delivery, leav ing the face blank to put the words forward emphatically and on their own. If so, Allen should have stuck with prose pieces as the form for his written words. In the flesh he does not have a straight, deadpan delivery. It is more a satire of deadpan, portunity to stop and savor any thing that struck a chord. Allen’s films are so stuffed with comedy, By LANCE LODER Non-Being and Somethingness bursts of nervous tension con tinually breaking through. So a drawing of him telling a joke should include a little of that nerv ousness, too. It wouldn’t be dif ficult, and it would add so much. Meaningful nervousness is, after all, the major substratum of his comedy. But all this would not be more than pointless quibbling if the idea were not so good. Woody Allen is a natural subject for a comic strip. The comic strip is a natural forum for his ideas. The single most enjoyable ad vantage of this book was the op three viewings are often required just to hear all the jokes. His Inside Woody Allen ©1978 by IWA Enterprises Inc. Hackenbush Productions Inc. lemme Y duke,CO TOMORROW EMU Food Service ■ • • BEER GARDEN 4-7 p.m. 12 oz. glass 350 pitcher $1.50/hotdogs 250 free popcorn Free Entertainment By ALIVE! This American Inquisition, with its burning of heretics, feeds upon a communal paranoia. The net re sult is that Coover exposes a parallel universe to our own which reflects the grotesque ironies and deceits inherent in our social order. Coover’s sense of allegory is excellent. But his writing, too often pretentious and highly-repetitive, butchers a good idea. The same story, with tighter organization, with less superfluous satire, with more rigorous editing, may have had more sting and vitality. Like so much of Coover’s writ ing (best exemplified by the short fiction in Pricksongs and De scants he chokes the reader with a glut of overly-rich prose. His im agery is so intense, his style so swift and supple, that one has no time to digest the author’s ideas. But the most disturbing quality to The Public Burning is the crea tive license of a fiction writer that Coover wantonly misuses to scourge public figures. Actual his tory can be fitted to the fictional mold, but such freedom doesn’t imply a need to take murderous shots at the facts. Nixon has committed enough imbecilities that new ones needn’t be invented (Continued on Page 7B) COPIES 30 >y OVER NIGHT NO, MINIMUM 8 am - 8 pm NOW OPEN SUNDAY 12-5 ~ KINKO’S 344-7894 1128-B ALDER STREET , 2nd floor Atrium 485-1063 i