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No one, including Allen, who is now 43, knows just how this obsession began and what sustained its growth. His relationship with his parents was close and loving. Brickman, 38, also a Brooklynite, surprisingly claims Allen learned "street smarts" at an early age. He adds that Allen's background was much more conventional than his own more bookish and politically oriented childhood. "Woody was little league and wanted to be an FBI agent and all that stuff," he says, exercising his comedy writer's prerogative to exaggerate, "while I was licking envelopes to help save the Rosenbergs."
Allen Stewart Konigsberg, to call Woody by his real name, was a college dropout. But in high school he was already making money providing gags for pressagents and columnists to attribute to celebrities. He went on to that finishing school for an entire generation of comedy writers, Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows. When Woody became a performer, though he hated standing out there all by himself, he climbed quickly to big clubs and television. He began his movie career as writer and player in a film he came to hate, What's New Pussycat? but it made money and helped establish him. Outwardly, Allen's history is in the tradition of the great American success stories. All his anguish is internal, which, of course, is not to be held against him.
As the one-liners have turned into dialogue of a rather subtle kind, Allen's old reliance on parody has also greatly diminished. He was an early devotee of the recent movie convention that comedy must live off the medium's own history, satirizing once beloved forms. Take the Money and Run, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1972) and Bananas (1971) contained brilliant brief send-ups of Ingmar Bergman and Sergei Eisenstein. But parody, like one-liners, is distancing, a way of protecting yourself from the full implications of your obsessions.
Allen began submerging his parodic impulses, or, anyway, integrating them more closely into his story, as early as Sleeper. But as recently as Annie Hall he was still reluctant to abandon the security blanket he wove for himself out of one-liners and sight gags. Throughout that picture, he cut away from the story for straight-to-the-camera routines about his past life. After all, his career had been built on this direct style. He felt obliged, as he once said, to keep "going for the big laugh all the time." Allen's mind drifts naturally to quick gags that he jots down on matchbooks and napkins as he wanders through life; it is a form of whistling past the graveyard.