Woody Allen is an American film director, writer, actor, and comedian with an impressive career spanning over six decades and multiple Academy Award-winning films. In the 1950s, he wrote material for the TV show Your Show of Shows, working with Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, and Neil Simon. Additionally, he released a number of short story and humor books for The New Yorker. During the early 1960s, he performed stand-up comedy in Greenwich Village alongside Lenny Bruce, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, and Joan Rivers, where he crafted his unique monologue style and the persona of an intellectual, fretful, and insecure nebbish. Furthermore, Allen released three comedy albums during the mid to late 1960s, being nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for his 1964 record Woody Allen. In 2004, he was ranked fourth on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians by Comedy Central and third-greatest by a UK survey.
Allen began writing short jokes when he was 15, and the following year began sending them to various Broadway writers to see if they'd be interested in buying any.
Allen sat on the foundation's original board of directors alongside Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Sydney Pollack, Robert Redford, and Steven Spielberg.
Allen has said that he was enormously influenced by comedians Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, Mort Sahl, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, playwright George S. Kaufman and filmmakers Ernst Lubitsch and Ingmar Bergman.
Allen started writing short stories and cartoon captions for magazines such as The New Yorker; he was inspired by the tradition of New Yorker humorists S. J. Perelman, George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley, and Max Shulman, whose material he modernized.
Allen also performed standup comedy on other series, including The Andy Williams Show and The Perry Como Show, where he interacted with other guests and occasionally sang.
Allen called it one of his three best films with Stardust Memories and Match Point.
Allen has combined tragic and comic elements in such films as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), in which he tells two stories that connect at the end.
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