LAUGHTER IN THE DARK.(Writer's Block)(Theater Review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 26-MAY-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

For nearly fifty years, Woody Allen has spun the dross of morbidity into the gold of comedy. The results of this alchemy have been precious and far-reaching. No modern comedian can match Allen's range or the quality of his output. His humor pieces for The New Yorker and other magazines, collected in three volumes, include some of the finest comic writing of the postwar period, and, as writer, director, and (usually) star of his movies, Allen is the only comedian since Charlie Chaplin to entirely control his own product--more than thirty films, of which about a dozen have entered America's cinematic repertoire. But the most important of Allen's creations is his own persona: Woody the schlepper triumphant. Where the early American comics made a myth of hope, Woody makes a myth of retreat. In him, the charm of agony replaces the charm of action. As he famously observed, "How can I find meaning in a finite universe given my shirt and waist size?"In the seventies and eighties, Allen, an entrepreneur of collapse, defined a winded America; now, as he slyly admits in...

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