Word: stand-up
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...next morning I called the FBI and told them to get me the hell out. I was scared to death. I was shakin'. I blame Scarfo. He's the guy who wanted to kill me. I'm 55 years old, and all my life I was a stand-up guy. I was loyal; I killed for the guy; I brought him millions of dollars. There's no way I was ever gonna turn. It never even entered my mind. What big sin did I commit? I got arrested. I was always prepared to go to jail. I figured...
...Vladimir Nabokov, that "the best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style." With Lax providing a sympathetic ear, Allen tells that story in piquant detail, from his early days writing one-liners for gossip columnists, through his stand-up comedy routines in clubs and on TV, to his present lonely eminence as the crafter of a distinctive, often distinguished body of films...
...long realized his tendency to play to the caviar crowd. When he was starting in stand-up comedy 31 years ago, his manager Jack Rollins told him, "You do lines only dogs can hear." Reflecting on his first, butchered script, for What's New Pussycat, which became enormously popular, Allen said, "If they had let me make it, I could have made it twice as funny and half as successful." By this standard, Allen's Alice (U.S. gross: $7 million) is 40 times as good as Home Alone (U.S. gross: $270 million...
...embarrass his subject. Perhaps Woody Allen has lived an exemplary life, but nobility doesn't make the pages burn, or even turn. One can't help wishing that, Latvian prince or not, Allen had written his own life. It would have been as different from this reverent read as stand-up is from doze...
ONLY THE TRUTH IS FUNNY. Jack Rollins and Charlie Joffe manage Woody Allen and David Letterman. Their new client, the first in more than a decade, is Rick Reynolds, whose lacerating autobiographical stand-up gets both laughs and tears off-Broadway...