Volume 25, Number 11 · June 29, 1978
Allen's Alley
By Michael Wood
On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy
by Eric Lax
Charterhouse, 243 pp., $8.95
Woody Allen: A Biography
by Lee Guthrie
Drake, 183 pp., $9.95
Woody Allen's Play It Again Sam
edited by Richard J. Anobile
Grosset & Dunlap, 192 pp., $7.95 (paper)
Non-Being and Somethingness: Selections from the Comic Strip Inside Woody Allen
drawn by Stuart Hample
Random House, 96 pp., $4.95 (paper)
There is a characteristic cadence in many of Woody Allen's jokes. A broad, old-fashioned gesture meets a narrow, uncooperative bit of contemporary reality. Allen waves casually to make a point and the record he is holding slips out of its sleeve and hurtles across the room. Smiling sardonically at himself in a mirror, Allen gets ready for a night on the town. When he turns on his hair-dryer, it blows him about as if it were a hurricane. He tries to make Beef Stroganoff in a pressure cooker, and someone asks him how it tasted. 'I don't know,' Allen says. 'It's still on the wall.'
Review, 3056 words
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