Laugh Out Loud: The 10 Funniest Lines from Woody Allen’s ‘Sleeper’ (1973)
Essay
10 of the Funniest Lines in Sleeper.
Woody Allen’s 1973 comedy moves so quickly that some of its best jokes barely have time to land before the next one arrives. These are ten lines that still make Sleeper one of the funniest films of his early career.
The dialogue
Ten lines worth hearing again.
Released in 1973 and written by Woody Allen with Marshall Brickman, Sleeper throws Miles Monroe 200 years into the future and then uses the setting as an excuse for everything from political satire to giant vegetables and a disembodied dictator’s nose.
The physical comedy is a huge part of why the film works, but the dialogue is just as good.
01
“My brain? It’s my second favorite organ!”
Miles has just been told that the authorities may electronically simplify his brain. His response tells you almost everything you need to know about the character: imminent danger, followed instantly by a sex joke.
It’s also one of those Woody Allen lines that works because of the pause you instinctively put before “second”.
02
“I just beat a man senseless with a large strawberry!”
There are few films in which this sentence could make perfect sense.
The giant-produce sequence is Sleeper at its most gloriously stupid, and Allen plays Miles’s amazement as though the absurdity of the weapon is somehow more troubling than the violence itself.
03
“204, if you count my marriage.”
Luna is amazed that Miles hasn’t had sex for 200 years.
Miles corrects her.
Six words, one marriage demolished.
04
“You’re biting my nails.”
“It’s because you’re tense.”
This is Allen and Diane Keaton beginning to find the rhythm that would become so important to their later films.
The joke is tiny. Luna points out something completely insane; Miles answers as though his behaviour is perfectly reasonable. Neither character stops long enough to acknowledge how ridiculous the exchange is.
05
“We’re here to see the nose. I heard it was running.”
By this point the Leader of the future United States has been reduced to a nose being kept alive while scientists prepare to clone him.
Allen could probably have left the visual joke alone.
Thankfully, he doesn’t.
06
“If I don’t get at least 600 years, I’m grouchy all day.”
Miles has already been asleep for two centuries and has just discovered that he’s living in a dictatorship where the government wants him dead.
His solution is entirely reasonable: go back to bed.
It’s one of the film’s best examples of Miles treating an extraordinary situation like a minor personal inconvenience.
07
“This stuff tastes awful. I could make a fortune selling it in my health food store.”
Sleeper gets a surprising amount of mileage from Miles having owned the Happy Carrot health-food shop in Greenwich Village.
The future has decided that the food people once considered unhealthy was good for them after all. Allen gets to make fun of both 1970s health fads and the certainty with which every generation believes it has finally worked nutrition out.
More than fifty years later, that joke has aged rather well.
08
“Yeah, they make you take any Spanish with that?”
Luna proudly announces that she has a PhD in oral sex.
Miles immediately wants to know about the course requirements.
The joke is pure early Allen: take something sexual, remove every trace of eroticism from it and turn it into a conversation about university credits.
09
“This is worse than California!”
Miles has learnt that dissenters in the future are subjected to mind reprogramming or extermination.
Naturally, California is his point of comparison.
It’s a throwaway line, which is exactly why it works.
10
“When people committed great crimes, they were forced to watch that.”
One of the best sequences has Miles, as the only surviving person who actually remembers the 20th century, being shown historical objects and asked to identify them.
Then Howard Cosell appears.
Miles explains his purpose in civilisation accordingly.
It’s a perfect example of something Sleeper does repeatedly: build an elaborate science-fiction premise simply to set up one very contemporary joke.
Why they still work
The
neurosis
survives.
Sleeper is probably the closest Woody Allen ever came to making a full-blown silent comedy. Much of its humour comes from movement, timing and visual absurdity.
But the one-liners matter because Allen never treats the futuristic world with much reverence. Miles wakes up 200 years later to discover dictatorship, cloning, electronic brainwashing, automated sex and enormous genetically engineered vegetables.
His basic response to all of it is still the same nervous New Yorker he was in 1973.
The technology changes. The neurosis survives.