There are critics who have suggested that Woody Allen be named a national art treasure, and I certainly would pledge my support for such a designation. In America's barren wasteland of comedy, he stands out like a Coke machine in the Mojave Desert. Yet two of his latest films, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, which he wrote and directed, and Play It Again, Sam, which he wrote but Herbert Ross directed, provide an interesting contrast in exploring the strengths and weaknesses of his comic talent.

Sex, a multi-episode film, is for the most part brilliantly directed…. Sex is quite clearly the work of a talent laced with genius. Yet it is not nearly so funny as Play It Again, Sam….

The humor in Sam falls into two categories: monologue and sight-gag. Woody spends a good deal of the film talking, either to himself or to his friend's wife … machine-gunning a non-stop series of Allenisms (e.g., he remembers the girl's birthday because it's the anniversary of his mother's hysterectomy). Other major comic sequences are built around slapstick type of material: an uproarious scene has him trying to act nonchalant when his friends bring him a blind date. (p. 42)

The film teeters on the edge of truth, managing to be poignantly real when it wants to be, and outrageously unreal when the situation calls for it…. (pp. 42-3)

What is it about Sex that, with all of its innovations, makes it less funny than Sam, a thoroughly enjoyable but more conventional film? Well, in Sex, Allen tosses off all conventions and lets his imagination run wild. In doing so, he comes up with devilishly clever material—but strays so far from reality that there is nothing tangible for the audience to grab onto and feel. Most of the humor is derived from shock value. In other scenes, Allen turns around and hits so close to home that the line between truth and satire becomes hopelessly blurred, for equally ineffectual results. (p. 43)

These problems stem from the fact that Woody Allen is still essentially a gag-writer trying to adapt his brand of humor to film. Try to picture Henny Youngman making a short subject out of "Take my wife—please," and you have the basic conflict of Allen's films.

A rare and happy exception is What's Up Tiger Lily?, a large-scale extension of a one-joke idea…. [Because] the Japanese footage was so engagingly bad, and Woody's ideas so consistently ludicrous, it all seemed to click….

Allen's first directorial effort, Take the Money and Run, suffered from an excess of "limbo" humor, neither verbal nor visual. More than any other Woody Allen film, one suspects that Money must have been an excruciatingly funny script to read. It's just that much of it doesn't play out on-screen….

Bananas has a firmer grip on screen comedy technique, although it has its share of "clever" gags which don't pay off—as when Miss America, testifying at a trial, bursts into a rendition of "Caro Nome," as if she were back at the talent trials of the beauty contest….

Another of Allen's problems is that he can't resist a gag, even when it intrudes on the situation. In the opening medieval segment of Sex, he plays a court jester and does a sidesplitting impression of Bob Hope delivering a monologue which gets no laughs. Then, ignoring his own spoof, he clutters the following scene with throwaway lines which only detract from the impact of the sequence….

Sex has at least one sequence which defies criticism, perhaps the only one in the entire film that succeeds on every point. It is the final segment, depicting the activity inside the male body as it engages in sex. Beginning with a fanciful premise …, Allen builds on it with clever dialogue, incredible visual ideas (a work team turning a giant wheel in order to effect an erection, eventually knee-deep in liquid), and the omnipresent gag lines (with Woody himself as one of the sperm about to take off into the "unknown"). The foundation of this delightful segment is a funny idea; with this as a starting-point, Allen's large heaping of comic ideas creates a richly funny episode. (p. 44)