Woody Allen.

I found it amazing how many times I had to stop and look up words while reading Woody Allen (at least three times). Allen tends to use lofty, scientific diction while talking about mundane annoyances of his privileged life. Quite like he does in his films, in "Nanny Dearest" he has made it so that everybody speaks in the same voice (which is, essentially, his own), despite the characters' obvious socioeconomic differences. That is, unless it is a coincidence that his "pleasant drone" of a nanny would think to call someone a "motormouthed little proton." Is it possible for a pleasant drone to be so writerly? I guess that's the joke.

I don't find Woody Allen as funny in his writing as I do in his films. His prose is often verbose and hard to access, especially when it is loaded with weird jargon and pop culture references. He goes out of his way to distinguish his wife as his "better half" or "the Immortal Beloved," expressing his ironic contempt for marriage cliches and consciously distancing himself from normalcy by saying things that are all too normal. Since he is famously neurotic, it seems he's using the language of doctors:

"A twitching in my cheek began its arrhythmic calisthenics, and drops of perspiration began emerging on my brow with audible snaps."

For whatever reason, the twitching and the perspiration drops have agency here. Woody Allen refuses to tell us that his cheek twitched and he was sweaty, and instead offers us the passive voice mixed with the voice of the directions/information on a prescription drug labels. It's as if he doesn't really want us to know what he's talking about, or, by using elevated language, he is differentiating his sweating and twitching from the kinds that regular people experience, because he has been formally diagnosed, and therefore uses drawn-out, medical terms.

He also makes uses of suspensive sentences as means for his jokes. It's his own very special way of delivering a punch line.

"Her successor, a nineteen-year-old French au pair named Veronique, who was all wiggles and cooing, with blond hair, the pout of a porn star, long tapered legs, and a rack that almost required scaffolding, was a far less truculent type. "

From the beginning of the sentence, we are awaiting his formal diagnosis of the bad nanny's successor, and gradually come to realize that the au pair was absurdly desirable based on his descriptions, yet she is diagnosed as "a far less truculent type," or someone who is less combative or difficult than the previous nannys, even though she was equally problematic. As he goes through his list of old nannies, we anticipate that each anecdote will be more awful and absurd than the next. Allen, then, is forced to squeeze his jokes into a single sentence, for pacing's sake.