I don’t know why this pops into my head now, but back during an early semester of college, I was assigned to write a biography on a favorite contemporary writer and I chose Dave Barry, whose writing I was enamored with at the time. I remember learning about his own influences as a writer, so I read them as well for research. I don’t remember them all, but Robert Benchley and Woody Allen were prominent among them.
I specifically remember reading an essay Allen wrote for the New York Times in 1972 called “A Brief, Yet Helpful, Guide to Civil Disobedience.” Here’s a segment of it:
A fine example of a demonstration was The Boston Tea Party where outraged Americans disguised as Indians dumped British tea into the harbor. Later, Indians disguised as outraged Americans dumped actual British into the harbor. Following that, the British disguised as tea dumped each other into the harbor. Finally, German mercenaries clad only in costumes from The Trojan Women leapt into the harbor for no apparent reason.
This closely recalls a bit from a column Barry wrote in the late-’80s called “Way to Go, Roscoe!”:
We’ve been trying to get tax reform for over 200 years, dating back to 17-something, when a small, brave band of patriots dressed up as Indians and threw tea into the Boston Harbor. Surprisingly, this failed to produce tax reform. So the brave patriots tried various other approaches, such as dressing up as tea and throwing Indians into the harbor, or dressing up as a harbor and throwing tea into Indians, but nothing worked.
Did Barry subliminally borrow the structure of Allen’s joke? Is the joke a traditional one? Or would it have come up for anyone who thinks long enough about the humor quotient of the Boston Tea Party? I at least think Allen’s bit is funnier, because of that “for no apparent reason” that pops up at the end.