Who else has had the career that Woody has?
He started selling jokes professionally while still in high school. He soon graduated to writing for television. (No, no matter how many times you read it, despite all the quotes you can dig up, no, he never wrote for Sid Caesar on “Your Show of Shows.” Never. He wrote for the Caesar’s Hour specials several years later.) While still in his twenties he was making $1700 a week.
He gave that up to start honing a stand-up act. After two years of prep, he struck it big with his first comedy album in 1964. The three albums he put out rank among the very best stand-up comedy ever done, and are hilarious in a way that nobody has ever matched: a combination of sheer audacious fantasy and carefully honed self-deprecating humor to create a personality as instantly identifiable as Groucho’s.
The stand-up made him a star and he branched out in every direction. He appeared all over television. Playboy used him regularly in comic pictorials. He was asked to write for big-budget motion pictures comedies.
Then he started writing comic pieces for The New Yorker. From his very first one, he was hailed as the successor to Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman. And rightly. His three collections of comic pieces rival any three other collections I could name. (And I’m a collector of American humor collections.)
Then he conquered Broadway. Don’t Drink the Water was a minor success, but Play It Again, Sam, which he starred in, was a classic.
What’s left but Hollywood? His early comedies were unlike anything being done in the late 60s- early 70s, and again rank among the best comedies ever.
Then he started a more mature style with Annie Hall. All it did was win him the Oscar for Best Director, and added Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Actress wins and a Best Actor[!] nomination for himself. This was before all those other actor-directors like Redford, Costner, and Eastwood got into the game.
Whatever you might think of his more recent pictures - I admit they are not nearly as good as his earlier work - he remains one of the only (who else? Altman, maybe) American directors to be able to work outside of the system and make any picture that he wants without a thought as to box office. Actors clamor to work for him, several have won Oscars for their work in his pictures, and he’s been personally nominated (for Best Director and Best Screenplay) about as often as anyone in history.
That’s an unparalleled career. I can think of no other artist who rose to the top in so many facets of show business and remained excellent for so long. (Bob Hope, whom Woody always mentions as a major influence, is a contender, but he relied on legions of writers for material that Woody writes for himself.)
I haven’t done more than glance at some of those threads that ask who will be remembered 50 years from now, but my guess is that Woody Allen’s name is rarely if ever mentioned. And my guess is that he will be remembered as one of the pre-eminent figures of the second half of the 20th century.