This trial is a travesty. It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.

The line is delivered as a comic outburst in Woody Allen’s early “stand-up/monologue” style, popularized through his 1960s–70s comedy writing and performances and later repeated in print collections of his humor. It riffs on the language of courtroom indignation—someone denouncing a legal proceeding as unfair—but pushes it into absurdity by piling up near-synonyms (“travesty,” “mockery,” “sham”) in an escalating, self-canceling chain. The joke depends on the audience’s familiarity with the cliché “a travesty of justice” and with melodramatic trial rhetoric, which Allen exaggerates until it becomes pure verbal slapstick.

The humor comes from overstatement and semantic inflation: the speaker wants to condemn the “trial,” but the condemnation becomes so elaborately compounded that it collapses into nonsense. Allen satirizes the way public outrage (especially in legal or political contexts) can become performative—more about sounding indignant than making a clear claim. The nested phrasing also parodies logical precision (as if the speaker is carefully classifying levels of fraudulence) while actually demonstrating the opposite: language used as a bludgeon rather than a tool for meaning. It’s a miniature example of Allen’s broader comic method—intellectual-sounding structure applied to petty or chaotic emotion.