[Woody Allen] has encouraged a "just fun" attitude toward his films while stealthily adding more elaborate sketches to his repertory in order to invite comparison with the great comedians of the past….

But Allen's sense of his own identity is too strong and too obtrusive for him ever to successfully camouflage himself as a mechanical man, the way Chaplin does in The Circus, the way Keaton enters animistically into harmony with other organisms. Nor can he quite envision a world of "normal" people as Lewis does in The Nutty Professor. Allen clings tenaciously to the worm's-eye view which is the source of his humor and of his success, and which defines the limits of his vision. It is the humor of a stand-up comic, wit that plays off a given world, rather than inventing it. It is a verbal, parochial, ratty, ethnic, bargain-basement humor, sexist, conservative, self-centered, and the funniest lines in Sleeper are hangover lines, when the "morning after" happens to be two centuries later….

In alien territory, Allen can just about survive. He lacks the ability of a Chaplin or a Keaton to turn expediency into poetry, and his overconcrete personality—Jewish ethnic, New York—is a cross he brandishes with bravado…. In this, Allen is very much in tune with the contemporary Zeitgeist, the vision of the alien as insider, the underdog as top banana. Whereas most comedians suggested, by their smallness or obesity, the plight of outsiders looking in, longing to join the beautiful people (and thus were universal), Allen, to his disadvantage and advantage, comes at a time when little of the decorum and ritual of an elitist society remains for the comedian to sabotage, and when the WASP establishment has been demoted, in movie mythology, with the ethnic occupying centerstage. (p. 130)

At the same time, Allen—and this is the source of the reactionary side of his wit—wants in. Like the traditionally upward-mobile Jewish kid, part of him wants to join the dumb goyim, the smiling blond middle-Americans whose surrogates are the lobotomized futuristic race of Sleeper who say "Green-witch Village" and never heard of Norman Mailer. But Allen never develops the tensions, and contradictions, inherent in this situation beyond showing a disinclination to become involved in a radical plot, by a group called Aries, to overthrow the government, and by showing a marked contentedness once he has been reconditioned as a member of the Establishment. He tries to have it both ways—the vernal paradise of the revolutionaries recalls Fahrenheit 451, but it also plays on the negative image of carnivores in Godard's Weekend.

Allen is too much a product of his own biography to make the leaps of association of which the great comedians were capable, or—and this is a more serious failing—to envision an adversary as a worthwhile opponent. Allen's vision of a futuristic society, despite the elaborateness of the sets under Dale Hennesy's art direction, makes one appreciate the authority of a Stanley Kubrick. The comedian lives in a symbiotic relationship with his enemy, and this is where we appreciate the genius of Chaplin and Keaton, not just in the sublime grace (or deliberate gracelessness) of their mimetic art, but on the conceptual level, in the instinct for investing the opponent with strength—the towering mass of the bully in Easy Street, the numerical advantage of the cops or the army of women in Keaton's films, which give rise to feats of grace and ingenuity and intimations of the spirit's immortality that are beyond the considerable talents of Woody Allen. (p. 131)