The Unruly Life of Woody Allen by Marion Meade

other words, he found his good-boy persona through trial and error.
    What he failed to acknowledge, at least not then, was how much his gropings owed to specific individuals, one of them being Bob Hope and his WASP schlemiel character, the vain, cowardly womanizer who ends up the winner. Only seven years old when his mother took him to see Road to Morocco, Woody knew every Hope film by heart and automatically copied Hope's smart-alecky attitude and superb timing. To Hope's fast one-liners and ad-libbed asides, Woody layered the nervous, stabbing delivery of Mort Sahl, the comic he idolized above all others. However, as he became slightly more comfortable in front of an audience—goaded no doubt by reviewers who had dubbed him "Son of Sahl"—his own unbuttoned personality began to emerge, and the material became more psychological. (Woody, who couldn't care less about JFK and Nixon, steered clear of Sard's topical material and instead joked about chasing gorgeous women.) In addition to borrowing from Hope and Sahl, he sprinkled his style with bits and pieces from other humorists—S. J. Perelman, Robert Benchley, Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Lewis—until what finally emerged was a plum pudding distinctly recognizable as the Woody Allen style.
    The political satire of Sahl and the social satire of a hipster such as Lenny Bruce could be appreciated anywhere, but Woody staked out territory that was local and familiar: His neighborhoods existed inside the city limits of Jewish New York, both the Brooklyn of his youth (he joked of pollution destroying German subs off Coney Island) and the exclusive Upper East Side, where as an adult he was easily mugged in the lobby of his Park Avenue building. But in one way or another, the subject of nearly all his humor would be Allan Konigsberg, his complaining little-boy self, with fanciful semi-confessional bits that evoked his own emotional geography: his mother whom he swore must have breast-fed him through falsies; his parents who rented out his room after he had been kidnapped, his screwball grandfather who sold him a gold watch on his deathbed, his experiences at N.Y.U. where he cheated on a metaphysics exam by peeking into the soul of another student.
    In time, the construction of his routines would grow more complex. The fantasy "Down South" tells of his visit to an unnamed southern city. Setting off to a costume party dressed as a ghost, he is offered a lift by a car full of men in white sheets. Soon the Klansmen discover he is worse than bogus, he is a New York Jew. They are not amused, and decide to lynch him on the spot, but Woody manages to calm them with an eloquent discourse on brotherhood. Typically, his routines had conclusions as quietly unexpected as a bang on the head. "Not only did they cut me down and let me go, but that night I sold them two thousand dollars worth of Israel bonds."
    In his most memorable monologue, "The Moose," Woody begins by offering the audience a story they won't believe. "I was hunting in upstate New York and I shot a moose." He straps the moose on the fender of his car, but on his way home, driving through the Holland Tunnel, the moose wakes up. What s more, the moose begins signaling for an illegal turn. As the routine unfolds and one line collapses hilariously into the next, Woody tries to get rid of the moose. In desperation, he takes him to a sophisticated East Side costume party where the moose mills sociably with the other guests. Not only does he blend in easily, he wins second prize for his costume, first prize having been awarded to a certain married couple named the Berkowitzes who came dressed in, of all things, moose suits. Woody's moose is understandably irritated and during the ensuing confrontation becomes unruly. The three moose knock one another unconscious. Woody grabs two of the moose, straps them to his fender, and hurtles back up to the woods, where he dumps them. The next morning, waking up in their moose suits, the