"As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree,' probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on"
About this Quote
Woody Allen’s joke works by pretending to take poetry literally, then puncturing it with the pettiest possible engineering question: bark, really? Joyce Kilmer’s line (“Only God can make a tree”) is devotional awe packaged as certainty. Allen swipes that aura and replaces it with the anxious handyman’s mindset, the kind that can’t see mystery without reaching for a screwdriver. The punchline isn’t just that he’s irreverent; it’s that he’s allergic to the posture of reverence itself.
The specific intent is classic Allen: deflate grand statements by dragging them into the neuroses of modern rationality. “Probably” is doing quiet work here, feigning humility while actually mocking the poet’s confidence. Instead of accepting the tree as evidence of the divine, he treats it like a production problem and can only land on bark as the sticking point. That’s funny because it’s absurdly small, but it also reveals a subtext: when you reduce wonder to mechanics, you don’t get clarity, you get a new kind of bafflement.
Context matters. Allen’s persona (especially in his early standup and films) thrives on the mismatch between cosmic questions and mundane panic: death, God, meaning, and then a joke about the practicalities of existence. The line also needles a certain cultural piety around “nature” as an argument-ender. He’s not disproving God; he’s exposing how thin some declarations of faith or awe can be when they’re treated as slogans rather than experiences. The bark gag is a scalpel: it cuts both sentimentality and the smugness of overconfident explanations.
The specific intent is classic Allen: deflate grand statements by dragging them into the neuroses of modern rationality. “Probably” is doing quiet work here, feigning humility while actually mocking the poet’s confidence. Instead of accepting the tree as evidence of the divine, he treats it like a production problem and can only land on bark as the sticking point. That’s funny because it’s absurdly small, but it also reveals a subtext: when you reduce wonder to mechanics, you don’t get clarity, you get a new kind of bafflement.
Context matters. Allen’s persona (especially in his early standup and films) thrives on the mismatch between cosmic questions and mundane panic: death, God, meaning, and then a joke about the practicalities of existence. The line also needles a certain cultural piety around “nature” as an argument-ender. He’s not disproving God; he’s exposing how thin some declarations of faith or awe can be when they’re treated as slogans rather than experiences. The bark gag is a scalpel: it cuts both sentimentality and the smugness of overconfident explanations.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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