Letting Woody Allen Go...
... and letting myself grow
Woody Allen’s in the Epstein files. And he’s not just in the Epstein files; he’s all over them as someone comfortable enough to ask favors, share confidences, and maintain a casual friendship with a convicted sex offender and blackmailer of the rich and famous. In the middle of a very sad scandal involving terrible crimes, I never thought I’d find something personal, that would rock my own sense of self.
I’m grinding the gears to get back to performing in a serious way for the first time since college. I recorded my special, West Coasting, for a friend’s production company and spent months preparing for it, but aside from that? I haven’t pursued standup seriously since COVID-19 shut everything down. This was so long ago now, the number 19 in that name stands for the year that I took a break.
But I am getting back into it. In a recent attempt to jumpstart my comedy brain, I was looking through an old comedy notebook from my mid-20s (I have them all), and I found a joke from my act that I’d forgotten all about, that used to kill:
When you’re having sex, in order to “hold back,” they say you should think about a baseball game.
My problem is that I’m a Mets fan, so I’ll find myself in bed with a woman, and I’ll start screaming, “No no no! Go back! GO BACK! What are you doing? Run it out, asshole! Goddammit. Okay, I’m going to get a beer, do you want anything?”
Very silly and a little offensive. So was the me I was when I was younger – just cute enough, just smart enough, and just hip enough to pull it off.
And then it all came back to me – I used to get around how dumb that joke was onstage by stealing a page from the playbook of one of my favorite comedians. I’d pause as if trying to be genteel, I’d stick weird euphemisms in there; the act of trying to get an embarrassing joke out became part of the joke.
Woody Allen.
When I was stuck in my 20s professionally, it was emulating Allen that got me free. I read a biography about him and learned his success was largely due to having an insane work ethic from a young age. I developed a serious work ethic. I listened to The Nightclub Years, a compilation of his recorded standup, and realized that it held the key to writing long-form standup. I emulated that, too. I got better. I got unstuck.
Everything followed from that. The fact that I pay my rent with comedy and not by being the “funny guy” in an office is entirely attributable to using Woody Allen as a professional role model. Hell, it’s the reason I have notebooks to look back on. And when you are a comedian, the pride you take in being successful means that the professional identity becomes a part of your personal identity.
Even from a young age, Woody Allen was a personal hero. A New York City hometown hero back when that really meant something, with non-movie star looks, who used his intellect and sense of humor to outmaneuver Hollywood and become an institution working on his own terms.
And now he’s in the Epstein files. Sadly, it’s not surprising. It’s even less surprising that he’s the kind of person who uses email like text, firing off twenty one-sentence emails in a row. That should be a crime in and of itself.
This wasn’t my first brush with dealing with Woody the creep, of course. What he’s done, and what he’s been accused of doing, is a matter of public record. I’ve written about this on this Substack a few years ago, about what it says about me when my heroes turn out to be heinous human beings. But even then I went through subsequent mental gymnastics to defend the man.
But coming to grips with a hero who commits monstrous deeds is tough. Because you reach a bottom with their behavior and you learn to rationalize and say, “Okay this thing isn’t proven, and in a world of rules and laws and safeguards this other thing can’t be as bad as people say. This person whom I’ve respected and idolized and trusted my whole life says all of these things aren’t true, and they can’t be true.”
And then a trapdoor opens and you learn that you haven’t begun to plumb the depths of their depravity. It’s like waking up from hypnosis and realizing I’ve been conditioned, against my own will, to distrust my own senses.
The fact that I pay my rent with comedy and not by being the “funny guy” in an office is entirely attributable to using Woody Allen as a professional role model.
I watched Bananas again the other night. I have a great memory of being a young child, with my father, watching it for the first time – a movie he’d recorded on our VCR off of HBO. I watched it multiple times in my youth, deciphering it like a comedy Rosetta Stone. A movie filled with jokes and gags and terrific sequences and was clearly the product of a young mind so excited to be allowed to do whatever it wanted. And this time, all I could think about was the Epstein files. And it made me sad.
I’m in the middle of a big life transition. Graduating from film school at my age, at my stage in my career means that I’m relearning who I am and who I want to be in the world. It’s thrilling. It’s exciting. There’s this world of possibilities opening up for me. And that is terrifying. And so.
I’m a proponent of separating the artist from the art, but this is now a case of learning to separate my own sense of self from the artist. And right now, I have to embrace my other heroes and let go of the ones who can no longer be defended. I’m learning.
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