For all the panache with which Woody Allen dashes off sight gags and cinematic puns (everything from Potemkin to Casablanca), his visual and verbal humour have always jostled for space on the screen. Allen's comedy is joke-oriented, and almost devoutly Jewish joke-oriented. His maladroit hero stumbles through life expecting social and sexual humiliation, and is usually rewarded with disaster. The world crashes about his ears with each mishap, and each gag seems to begin from scratch rather than building from previous situations.

Confessing his unfitness for survival in a constant, self-deprecating monologue, Allen's little man has neither the never-say-die spastic energy which inspired the visual contortions of Jerry Lewis' best comedies, nor the affected 'cool' of Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau, skating with a certain bumbling style over the thin ice of total incompetence…. Allen is not so much a man pitting his wits against impersonal forces as a physically inept creature going down under another onslaught. His comedy has little conventional timing and acrobatic inventiveness. The styleless, graceless collision of situations is precisely the point, and in defeat the hero always retreats with humility, almost gratefully.

Visual parody and throwaway gags follow rather limply in the train of Allen's wisecracking philosophy of frustration, and the parodies and the monologue have yet to meet in a complete movie. Play It Again, Sam … is perhaps the least inventive of his films, but it is the most consistent and developed in its humour. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex … has been filmed in the direct and unfussy way that Allen has evolved since the first messy camera rovings of Take the Money and Run. It is a technique which quickly sets up and makes the most of each gag, but which only lends itself to very plain social satire when the verbal humour dries up….

In other instances, Allen's parody is too straight and literal (the 'What's My Perversion?' TV panel game; the sexual research centre which looks like Frankenstein's laboratory) to be more than intermittently effective. The best episodes gain a lot from Allen's own presence….

[Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex] undoubtedly has an advantage over his two previous features in that it lacks the inconvenience of a plot. But even in an episodic framework, his comic gifts are too wayward to escalate a joke with the convulsive intensity and visual surprise of Jerry Lewis at his best. The classically put-upon little man that is Allen's own screen persona never seems to develop as far as it might, for want of a consistently appropriate context.