Woody Allen, Standup Comic

My favorite all-time filmmaker is Woody Allen, no doubt about it. If I made a list of my 100 favorite films, he'd have about ten of them. But I first came to know him when I was an adolescent, and it was not through his films--it was his writing and his stand-up comedy. When I was about fifteen or so I bought a copy of Without Feathers, which I still have somewhere, tattered and held together with tape, as I read it hundreds of times. Then, through a record club I belonged to, I got a recording of his stand-up act, which I also played over and over again. For my birthday the other day, a friend gave me a CD of a slightly different version of that recording, and I listened to it again, laughing just as much as I ever have.

Many people may not realize that Allen was first visible as a stand-up. Before that he wrote gags for newspaper columnists and for television, and then in the sixties was a nightclub comedian, appearing on television quite a bit, even guest-hosting the Tonight Show. Listening to his act, you can hear the persona he would assume in his earliest films, that of a nebbish who is constantly victimized by the strong and stupid. Some of the stories he spins on stage ended up in written form in his New Yorker "casuals" that would end up in one of his books, like Without Feathers. What isn't evident in this recording, though, is any sense that he was capable of films like Manhattan or Hannah and Her Sisters.

Allen's stand-up stuff is largely in the same world as other sixties comics like Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby, or Dick Gregory. Instead of a string of gags, he tells stories, some of them about his upbringing in Brooklyn (his parents' values were "God and carpeting,") his failed first marriage, which have echoes of Henny Youngman, "I tended to place my wife underneath a pedestal," and bizarre, almost surreal tales such as how he shot a moose and ended up taking it to a costume party, where it came in second in the best costume prize to a Jewish couple who were dressed as a moose. The main themes of his humor are his Jewishness (the moose-story's punchline is about the New York Athletic Club being restricted against Jews, a curio that is thankfully forgotten in this day and age) and his neuroses. There are many jokes about him being in analysis, such as being on the "latent paranoid softball team." "I would steal second base and feel guilty and go back."

Mostly, though, Allen plays the victim. He is constantly getting roughed up ("I won two weeks at Interfaith Camp, where I was sadistically beaten by boys of all races and creeds"), antagonized by mechanical objects, such as a talking elevator, and losing out in the game of love. He tells about getting aced out of going out with a good-looking girl by Peter O'Toole during the filming of What's New, Pussycat? "I asked her if she had a sister for me. She did--Sister Maria Theresa. It was a dull evening. We discussed the New Testament, and decided that He was remarkably well-adjusted for an only child."

There is much, much more. In these days of YouTube and MP3 players, the comedy record is a relic, but when the comedian is someone like Woody Allen, providing a snapshot of a comedic genius in his early years, the relic is quite precious.