Woody Allen: Rabbit Running

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Willing Writer. Allen's spoken words often have a slapdash, off-the-cuff quality—most outrageously displayed in his film What's Up, Tiger Lily, a Japanese melodrama bearing Woody's hilarious non-sequitur dubbing. Yet his written prose displays the tongue-and-groove perfectionism of a genuine craftsman. "Allen is a marvel of a willing and hard-working writer," says Roger Angell, fiction editor of The New Yorker. "The first things he submitted to us were funny, but not really written; one heard a stand-up comic —good jokes, but just jokes. Allen has made himself an accomplished writer."

How accomplished can be seen in a delicious parody called Death Knocks, Woody's screwball homage to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. In Allen's piece, the game is not chess but gin rummy, and the role of the crusader is played by Nat Ackerman, a dress manufacturer. Death refuses to pay for his losses. "Why should you need money?" Ackerman inquires. Death: "What are you talking about? You're going to the Beyond—you know how far that is?" Ackerman: "So?" Death: "So where's gas? Where's tolls?" Nat: "We're going by car!" The Chrysler to oblivion could easily have been concocted by S.J. Perelman. The master parodist's influence shows in another sketch. Notes from the Overfed. Allen writes, after reading Dostoevsky and Weight Watchers magazine on the same plane trip: "I am fat. I am disgustingly fat ... My fingers are fat. My wrists are fat. My eyes are fat ... If there is a God, then tell me, Uncle, why there is poverty and baldness? Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?"

In A Look at Organized Crime, he fearlessly exposes the blood code of the Mafia ("Death is one of the worst things that can happen to a Cosa Nostra member, and many prefer simply to pay a fine"). In this, and in most of his other recent pieces, Allen displays a debt to the creator of the Blind Explanation, Robert Benchley ("There is no such place as Budapest"). "Benchley has become a new idol for me," Allen says today. "Perhaps because everybody else also imitates Perelman's complicated style, I've tried to get simpler, like Benchley, and to write about subjects that really concern me."

Such as? "Well, from the time I get up till the time I get to sleep, I think constantly about sex and death." In this he is not too dissimilar from the rest of humankind. But there is a dark side to Allen's obsession that occasionally hovers above the laughter. From the beginning, for instance, he has been fond of ambiguous God jokes: "The message is, God is love, and you should lay off fatty foods." God references appear throughout his films and sketches. In a piece called Mr. Big, Allen, a hard-cooked private I, is on the lookout for the Supreme Being. "Somebody with that description just showed up at the morgue," the cops tell him. "It's the work of an existentialist." How can you tell? he argues. "Haphazard way how it was done. Doesn't seem to be any system followed. Impulse."