In the last fifteen years Woody Allen has grown from a cult favorite into America's foremost humorist. After an apprenticeship as a gag writer, Allen became a stand-up comedian. His work in club and campus shows has been preserved on three long-play ecords, which have twice been reissued as two-record sets.x Allen received his first international attention when he wrote and appeared in the phenomenally successful film, What's New, Pussycat? (1965). His own first two features, What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966) and Take the Money and Run (1969), established his coterie of fanatic followers. He wrote two successful Broadway plays: Don't Drink the Water (1966) and Play It Again, Sam (1969). Then came a series of increasingly ambitious films: Bananas (1971), Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex "' (*but were afraid to ask) (1972), and Sleeper (1973). During this period he made frequent forays into print. His work in Playboy or Esquire involved comic pretenses to being a man-about-town. His more intellectual prose humor began to appear in The New Yorker and The New Republic. With the release of his feature film, Love and Death (1975), it became clear that Allen was not "just a comedian"--as the popular prejudice might have it--but a serious, probing artist with a consistent and distinctive vision. He happens to work in the comic mode.

The truth is that from the very beginning, Allen's comedy has deserved thoughtful study. But artistry is not as readily recognized in comedy as in other art forms. While comedy may be the most widely appreciated art, it is also the most undervalued.

There are several explanations for this. For one thing, although comedians admit that "comedy is a serious business," one that requires painstaking care, discipline, timing, and planning, comedy must seem spontaneous. The comedian's labors to seem effortless may lead the viewer to believe that he is merely being diverted and amused. Moreover, the spirit of comedy requires that a comedian express his ideas indirectly, rather than explicitly. Thus, just by choosing to work in the comic mode, the artist is already concealing the seriousness of his purpose. In addition, audiences may share Horace's distinction between the dulce and the utile in art--as if what is enjoyable cannot also be useful, and what is instructive cannot delight. There may even be a physiological basis for our customary condescension toward comedy. When we watch a comedy our instinctive reaction is something other than thoughtful consideration: we laugh. Because this laughter provides a release from the tension set up by the work, no other response is necessary. We can laugh the work aside. Whatever the reason, our disrespect for comedy is so deeply ingrained that we use the same word, serious, as the antithesis of both comic and trivial. The implication is that nothing important can be conveyed by comedy.

Woody Allen has pointed out that "laughter undermines respect. The frivolity attached to laughter prevents people from respecting it and taking it seriously." While admitting that "comedy is harder to do than serious stuff," Allen notes that comedy makes a lesser impact: "When comedy approaches a problem, it kids it but it doesn't resolve it. Drama works it through in a more emotionally fulfilling way."

The comedian's traditional response to being taken lightly is to pretend that his work is innocent of meaning. In 1972 Allen warned against the tendency to "over-analyze" his movies for "heavy, intellectual nonsense," when "all I want people to do is laugh at the movie." But the only films he had then made were the ones he later described as "trivial." He admitted that Sleeper had "a slight point--nothing profound, but a slight, satirical point about which way I thought society was moving." Love and Death also had "a slight satirical point about dying and war, and the transitory quality of love." a Allen's serious concerns were exposed more openly in Annie Hall, in his non-comic feature, Interiors (1978), and in Manhattan (1979) but he had focused on the same themes in his early comedies. For example, both What's New, Pussycat? and Manhattan explore the difficulty of reconciling one's self with a desired image, and the greater tension between the urge to assert one's individuality and the need to immerse oneself in some larger identification, whether through art, religion, or romance. This consistency between Allen's later "serious" work and his earlier comedies proves his 1974 remark that "great humor is intellectual without trying to be." 6

In this book we will examine all Allen's available works. We begin by defining the persona or image that Allen developed in his monologues, because he has used that image as his base in almost all his work, even in the films that he has made for other directors. We will survey his plays and his prose and then proceed to his most important body of work, the feature films. In each case our intention will be to define the structure and themes of the work.

Our purpose is to determine what Allen's jokes mean, what response they prompt besides laughter. ,Whether in a "serious" work or in a comedy, a detail expresses its meaning in two ways. It may evoke associations beyond what it literally denotes, which is the function of metaphor, or it may derive specific meaning from its context, from its relation to other details in the work. A couple of examples from Allen's Broadway comedy, Play It Again, Sam, will demonstrate how the precise wording of a joke can advance the wider themes of the play.

We should also expect that jokes within a work will relate to each other, because in a work of art all the material is conceived under the same pressure of the imagination. The jokes are all thought of in the same breath, so to speak. By examining the metaphoric effect of Allen's jokes and their interrelationships, we should be able to define the meaning and the integrity of his work.

However funny it is, the Allen canon consistently expresses the' anxieties of a modern urban sensibility, with its dreams of glory and its frustrations, its sense of isolation, and its doubts about the existence of a God and the dignity of man. Allen is especially interested in the relationship between art and life. On the one hand, art affords relief from the uncontrollable forces in reality. On the other, our self-conception is obscured by the myths and rhetoric that film and other media inflict upon us. Consequently Allen's work involves two kinds of self-consciousness. One is the self-reflexive aspect of the work--its form is part of its subject. As Alvy Singer tells Annie Hall, "the medium enters in as a condition of the art form itself." The other is human self-consciousness; Allen based his career upon the candid exposure of a sensitive, frightened, and warmly representative modern soul, the Allen image or persona.