Woody Allen Considering Return to Standup

In a recent interview with the New York Times, comedy legend Woody Allen revealed that after recently watching Mort Sahl perform at the Cafe Carlyle, he was inspired to return to standup. He told NYT: "Watching him, I had the same feeling now, in 2013, as I had when I saw him in 1950-something. Of, "Hey, I'd like to get back onstage and do standup again." He inspired me then to be a standup comic, and all these years later, I thought of it again because of him. He makes that phenomenon so enticing."

When asked if he would be able to fit standup into his busy film schedule he responded, "I was thinking of it. Since I saw him, I've just been toying with the idea. I would love to see if I could. Just getting together an hour of stuff to talk about would be a lot of work."

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Allen began as a comedy writer in the 1950s, penning jokes and scripts for television and also publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen started performing as a stand-up comic, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comic, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he insists is quite different from his real-life personality.[2] In 2004,Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third greatest comedian.

By the mid-1960s Allen was writing and directing films, first specializing in slapstick comedies before moving into more dramatic material influenced by European art cinema during the 1970s. He is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late '70s. Allen often stars in his own films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup. Some of the best-known of his over 40 films areAnnie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and Midnight in Paris (2011). Critic Roger Ebert described Allen as "a treasure of the cinema"