A short life of the author
Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg, 1 December 1935) is an American filmmaker, comedian, playwright, and writer who, in addition to directing over fifty films, produced a body of written humour — principally short pieces published in The New Yorker and collected in Getting Even (1971), Without Feathers (1975), Side Effects (1980), and Mere Anarchy (2007) — that constitutes the finest American comic prose since S.J. Perelman. His written work is often overshadowed by his film career, but it stands entirely on its own: the pieces are brilliantly constructed parodies of philosophical discourse, literary criticism, psychoanalytic theory, detective fiction, and the general condition of being a neurotic Jewish intellectual in twentieth-century America.
The Prose
Allen’s comic prose belongs to a specific tradition: the tradition of the American Jewish literary comedian that includes Perelman, Benchley (as an honorary member), and Groucho Marx’s letters. His method is the application of absurdist logic to serious or pretentious subjects — philosophy, religion, death, art — producing a comedy that is simultaneously very funny and genuinely engaged with the ideas it parodies.
“My Philosophy” (Getting Even) is a perfect example: a mock-philosophical essay that contains the line “Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.” “The Whore of Mensa” (Without Feathers) is a detective story about an agency that provides intellectuals to men who want someone to discuss Proust and Kafka with — a parody of both hardboiled fiction and intellectual pretension. “The Kugelmass Episode” (Side Effects) — in which a City College professor is magically inserted into Madame Bovary — won the O. Henry Award and is one of the finest comic short stories in the American canon.
Allen’s prose style is precise and deceptively simple. He writes in short, clean sentences that build to punchlines with the timing of a stand-up routine — which is not surprising, since Allen was one of the great stand-up comedians of the 1960s before becoming a filmmaker.
Getting Even (1971)
Allen’s first collection includes pieces written for The New Yorker, Playboy, and The Evergreen Review in the late 1960s. “The Scrolls,” a parody of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery, and “A Look at Organized Crime,” a mock-scholarly essay, are standouts. The collection established Allen as a literary humorist of the first order.
Without Feathers (1975)
The second collection — its title taken from Emily Dickinson — is Allen’s best. “The Whore of Mensa,” “Death (A Play),” and “Selections from the Allen Notebooks” (a parody of writers’ notebooks that includes “Should I marry W.? Not if she won’t tell me the other letters in her name”) are among the funniest pieces of writing in the English language.
Side Effects (1980)
The third collection contains “The Kugelmass Episode” and other pieces that show Allen at the peak of his powers as a prose writer. After Side Effects, Allen published no new prose collection for twenty-seven years — a gap that may reflect the increasing demands of his film career.
Later Works
Mere Anarchy (2007) returned Allen to New Yorker prose with pieces that are competent but lack the manic inventiveness of the earlier collections. Apropos of Nothing (2020), Allen’s memoir, is a substantial autobiography covering his childhood in Brooklyn, his career in comedy, television, and film, and his own account of the personal controversies that have surrounded him since the 1990s. The memoir was published by Arcade Publishing after Hachette dropped it following employee protests.
Critical Standing
Allen’s prose is taken less seriously than it deserves — partly because it is comic (comedy is always undervalued by literary critics), partly because it is overshadowed by his films, and partly because his personal life has made critical appreciation of his work fraught. Assessed purely on literary grounds, the best pieces in Without Feathers and Side Effects belong in the permanent canon of American comic writing.
Collecting Allen
Getting Even (1971, Random House) in first edition with dust jacket brings $40–$100. Without Feathers (1975, Random House) brings $30–$80. Side Effects (1980, Random House) brings $20–$50. Signed copies are available but not particularly scarce — Allen signed books at his regular Monday-night jazz performances in New York for decades.