Woody Allen and Poetry

I'm reading the article, and as I do, I'm blogging about it, but one part struck me as interesting. Allen notes that because he never attended university, he reads broadly but without depth, because he never mastered studying in a systematic way. But he says he thinks that had he gone to university, he may have could've written poetry, because his work in humor is actually kind of similar.

I think that had I been better educated, I could write poetry, because a writer of comedy has some of that equipment to begin with. You’re dealing with nuance and ear and meter, and one syllable off in something I write in a gag ruins the laugh. . . . In actual one-liners, there’s something succinct, you do something that you do in poetry. In a very compressed way you express a thought or feeling and it’s dependent on the balancing of words. [Allen] points to his famous joke: “I’m not afraid of dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Of it he notes, “In a compressed way it expresses something, and if you use one word more or less it’s not as good.”