Anyone remember the comic “Inside Woody Allen”?
When I was a kid, I didn’t realize Woody Allen was a REAL GUY!
Seeing him on TV in a movie, I said to myself,“Hey that’s the guy
You have any memories of the comic, or the man, in general?
The comic was drawn by Stuart Hemple in the mid to late 1970s. There is a collection of the comics called “Non-Being and Somethingness” that came out in 1978. The collection has a very strange introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller, but nothing in it by Hemple himself about the comic. Many of the jokes in the strip were taken directly from Allen’s comedy albums and books.
In Woody Allen: A Biography , Eric Lax has this to say about the origins of the strip:
In 1976, Inside Woody Allen , drawn by Stuart Hemple with jokes in part from Woody’s collection that he jotted down on scraps of paper, premiered in 180 newspapers in sixty countries. It ran for eight years. Hemple, a cartoonist who is now a playwright and screenwriter, became friendly with Woody in his earliest days as a performer. Woody says Hemple, along with Diane Keaton and writer Pat McCormick, is one of the best laughers to have in the audience when performing in a nightclub (“they make up for a hundred people in terms of contribution”). Hemple suggested the strip, and Woody, along with Rollins and Joffe, thought that it would be a good way to promote himself.
Every Saturday when they met to talk over the jokes and look at the sketches (Woody was as rigorous about every creative detail as he is with all his projects), Hemple brought a sheaf of newspapers and stories related to the strip. Once he came with some Brazilian papers that gave it front-page coverage.
“Isn’t that great?” Hemple asked Woody.
“How do I know? I don’t read Portuguese.”
“You don’t have to be able to read it to see they ran your picture and comic strip on the front page.”
Woody looked silently at the paper for a minute. “I don’t see the word juif ,” he said, then added. “Why am I always popular in countries where they torture people?”