WOODY WEDNESDAY Woody Allen: The Stand-Up Years 1964-1968 (Part 6)

 

Woody Allen Stand Up Comic 1964 1968 11 Oral Contraception

 

Woody Allen – The Stand-Up Years 1964-1968

BY
ON JANUARY 08, 2015, 11:00PM
5 COMMENTS
woodyallen-thestandupyearsB+
ARTIST
RELEASE DATE
JANUARY 13, 2015
LABEL
RAZOR & TIE
FORMATS
DIGITAL, VINYL, CD
Woody Allen is 79 now, and he’s still working, still making movies of decent to marvelous quality every year, yet, one has to start wondering what he’ll be remembered most for when his time is done. It’s probably an obnoxious side effect of old age: existential evaluation. Amidst all the hype, legacy, and scandal surrounding Woody Allen as a brand-name writer, director, actor, neurotic, and potentially dubious family man, Allen above all has been a consummate joke maker. He’s just always been an incredibly funny guy.Listening to The Stand-Up Years 1964-1968 is a delightful timepiece and a fabulously constructed best-of portrait of Woody Allen.Stand-Up Years culls materials from Allen’s three albums in the ‘60s, along with previously unheard bits. The compilation’s a funny thing not just because of Allen’s sense of humor, but because Allen resisted doing stand-up for the longest time. Allen was only secondarily interested in stand-up; he’s admitted to always thinking of himself as a pure playwright. Yet, when he met with the likes of Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe, “the Rolls Royce of management,” as Allen brags in the album, he was provoked into being a comedian. Of course, Allen resisted at first and then went to work making the jokes with his typical nebbish fervor. Allen drops anecdotes about how Jack Rollins saw him as nothing but pure potential, the makings of a major star, and was incredibly supportive and willing to tap the comic’s unrealized gifts. Nice one, Rollins.Admittedly, much of The Stand-Up Years was already heard in the perfect 1999 collectionStandup. The last five tracks are just excerpts from Robert B. Weide’s phenomenal Woody Allen: A Documentary from 2012. Still, that doesn’t make Allen’s jokes any less funny or this package less intriguing. Everyone’s fully aware of his distinctly East Coast nasally aura, and it doesn’t jive with everyone. If you want shouty observations and Aziz Ansari-style parodies, there are hundreds of aggressive comedy podcasts out there right now ripe for the picking. If you want a shrewd, witty, and articulate misanthrope at the top of his game, then get in on this. Allen was not into the art of forbearance — he rushed through jokes with anxiously snide mastery.In a way, Stand-Up Years feels like the loving end of an era for certain comics: the Henny Youngman-style Catskill cats. The Borscht Belt punchliners. Woody Allen, while infatuated with the likes of Mort Sahl and Shelley Berman, brought his own take on comedy. He gave humor a new mode of personality-driven style. In Allen’s case, it was pure self-depreciation. Stand-Up Years gives us Allen talking about failed marriages (“Second Marriage”), his bumbling career (“The Vodka Ad”), his weird family (“My Grandfather”), and some of the finest awkward sexual encounters you’ll ever hear (“Vegas” tears down the house).  But that’s not to say Allen doesn’t indulge in out-there scenarios about hypnosis or a sci-fi film about aliens in need of slacks. It’s like listening to and understanding the classical arts of telling a joke and having a voice. Woody’s presence was unmistakable. Still is. It becomes so amazingly clear while listening to this. The album takes on a complicated quality in how it plays the jokes, then ends with Allen’s self-evaluation of his live audience heyday. Still, and most importantly, the jokes play the rooms.Allen’s punchline summing up his artistic integrity losing out in the presence of money in his bit “The Vodka Ad” kills every time. “Down South” is still a blisteringly tense tale of Southern-fried phobias regarding the KKK and hangings, told tellingly by a Jewish, left-wing New Yorker, about a great, big mix-up when Allen dresses as a white ghost for a Halloween party and ends up at a Klan rally (“I must’a said ‘grits’ 50 times”). There’s even the “Lost Generation” bit here, which inspired Midnight in Paris many years later.Perhaps one of the funniest finds is over five minutes of mixed questions and answers he would do at the end of his sets. It’s the funniest and most telling part of the album. Allen talks about his “pro-Catholic pornographic musical” and his political status as a “registered pervert.” That last thing is an “independent party,” Allen nonplusses. During a show, a woman mortifyingly asks Allen if he’s ever “been picked up by a homosexual.” Allen coyly repeats the question, for clarity, then plainly replies, “No, sir.” Quintessential Allen: peerless, depraved, and self-conscious while getting the last, and best, laugh.Essential Tracks: “The Vodka Ad”, “Down South”, and “Vegas”____________

Woody Allen Stand Up Comic 1964 1968 19 My Marriage

I have spent alot of time talking about Woody Allen films on this blog and looking at his worldview. He has a hopeless, meaningless, nihilistic worldview that believes we are going to turn to dust and there is no afterlife. Even though he has this view he has taken the opportunity to look at the weaknesses of his own secular view. I salute him for doing that. That is why I have returned to his work over and over and presented my own Christian worldview as an alternative.

My interest in Woody Allen is so great that I have a “Woody Wednesday” on my blog www.thedailyhatch.org every week. Also I have done over 30 posts on the historical characters mentioned in his film “Midnight in Paris.” (Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemingway,T.S.Elliot,  Cole Porter,Paul Gauguin,  Luis Bunuel, and Pablo Picassowere just a few of the characters.)

Woody Allen – “The New Comic” from The Stand-Up Years

Published on Dec 4, 2014

Woody Allen – “The Stand-Up Years” Available January 13, 2015. Pre-order on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Stand-Up-Ye…

-INCLUDES ALL THREE LIVE STAND-UP ALBUMS RECORDED BETWEEN 1964-1968
-REMASTERED AND AVAILABLE ON CD AND DIGITALLY
-BONUS MATERIAL INCLUDES: AUDIENCE Q&A AND OVER 20 MINUTES OF AUDIO EXCERPTS FROM WOODY ALLEN: A DOCUMENTARY

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By Everette Hatcher III, on June 10, 2015 at 12:32 am, under Woody Allen. No Comments
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