It's been many years since Woody Allen did stand-up comedy, the reason being that he was changing his spots, artistically. He wanted to be taken seriously, spoken of in the same breath as Bergman. And what does he want now? To have his stuff appear in the New Yorker, apparently, for whose pages Bruce McCall and Paul Rudnick produce infinitely more inventive material. The New Yorker may have more prestige, but stand-up is a genuinely testing form. Many of these pieces sound like bad stand-up anyway, like this routine about particle physics from Strung Out: "My grasp of general relativity and quantum mechanics now equals Einstein's - Einstein Moomjy, that is, the rug seller. How could I not have known that there are little things the size of 'Planck [sic] length' in the universe, which are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter? Imagine if you dropped one in a dark theater how hard it would be to find. And how does gravity work? And if it were to cease suddenly, would certain restaurants still require a jacket?'
I could go on - he certainly does. Woody Allen should try this material out on a paying audience, to see if he can put it across. If he can, then he's still a formidable performer, but he needs to hire a better writer.
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