Woody Allen may be most famous as an actor and director, but he also had an eight-year run as the star of his own syndicated newspaper comic strip, Inside Woody Allen, that ran from 1976 to 1984. For those who don’t remember that far back, creator Stuart Hample, who drew the strip, has collected 220 of those vintage strips in his new book, Dread and Superficiality: Woody Allen as Comic Strip, which was recently published by Abrams.
Allen’s nebbishy persona is the star in these strips, which range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Some are one-liners that could come straight from his routines. “A theological notion: Dial-A-Prayer for atheists,” cartoon Woody writes in his journal. “When you call it, nobody answers.”
In another strip, he asks his psychiatrist “Are humans in a state of nature savages—as Hobbes thought—or innocent, loving creatures—as Rousseau thought?”
“It depends,” the psychiatrist answers. “Weekdays, Hobbes was right. Weekends, Rousseau.”
Other strips poke fun at Allen’s supposed lack of prowess with women. “Why do all the women in my life say I’m a lousy lover?” he jots in his private journal. “How can they make a definitive judgment in only 3 minutes?”
Hample has known Allen since his early days as a standup comedian. In the mid-1950s, when Hample was writing material for standup comic Frank Buxton and Allen was writing for Herb Shriner’s TV show, they shared a manager, and Hample was there when Allen started working standup. “I saw him a lot, and I occasionally went to parties with him,” Hample said.
Years later, in the mid-1970s, Hample was drawing a daily newspaper strip when he got the inspiration for a strip with Allen as the main character. “I called him up, and I said, ‘I have this idea,’ and he said, ‘Why don’t you bring over some sketches,’” Hample said. Allen had recently been caricatured by New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren and was none too pleased with the result, but he liked Hample’s more realistic version. “When I went to see him the first time and gave him the sketches, he said ‘Bring me the jokes,’” Hample remembers, “and when I brought them, he said quietly, ‘Maybe I can help you with the jokes.’ What he did was he gave me these pages of jokes and said you can adapt anything from there or from my standup material or my books, whatever you want.” Allen also gave Hample his notebooks, some of which are photographed for the book, and Hample drew heavily on this material in writing the strip. He also worked with David Weinberger, who is now known as a technology consultant and the writer of The Cluetrain Manifesto but was a philosophy student at the time (the Hobbes/Rousseau gag is his).
Allen insisted on seeing every strip. “In the beginning, I went to him every Saturday so the tone of it would be set,” Hample said. While Allen approved most strips, he did ask Hample to set one aside, a comic that featured Allen’s favorite restaurant, Elaine’s. “He looked at that and said ‘Let me just hold this one.’ I said ‘Why?’ and he said ‘I don’t know.’ The next week he said ‘I’ll get back to you on that.’ That was around 1983, and I’m still waiting for him to call me and say OK either you can or you can’t.” Although Allen used Hample’s caricature of him as the basis of an animated sequence in Annie Hall, he would not allow Hample to take CBS up on an offer to turn the strip into an animated situation comedy, fearing overexposure.
On the other hand, the strip did bring Allen exposure in parts of the country where his movies might not have played so well. In the introduction to the book, Hample recalled a story about actress Mary Beth Hurt, who hailed from Iowa, phoning her mother to say she had just been cast in Allen’s movie Interiors. Hurt told her the director was “somebody you probably haven’t heard of, a director named Woody Allen,” to which her mother responded, “I know about him. He’s in the funny pages.” Allen shares the copyright of the strip and gets a share of the royalties, Hample said.
The very notion of a syndicated newspaper strip featuring Woody Allen embodies a contradiction, however. “Woody, a brilliant creator of comedy in many forms, wanted an intelligent strip with well-rounded characters and sequences of observational humor with narrative drive instead of unrelated gags manufactured exclusively to lead to ba-da-boom! punch lines,” Hample said in an e-mail. “While the syndicate frowned on esoteric references like God and death and sex and philosophical concepts,” Hample said, outlining the dilemma he faced in producing the strip. Hample mediated this tension for eight years, but eventually, by his own admission, he felt overloaded and was getting bored. He had started writing for the TV situation comedy Kate & Allie, and, he said, he always was most enthusiastic about a project at the beginning. So he told Allen he wanted to end the strip.
A print edition of the strip, titled Non-Being and Somethingness, appeared during its initial run, but the deluxe edition had to wait a bit. About three years ago, Hample said, Charles Kochman, who had been newly hired as an editor at Abrams, collared him at New York Comic-Con and said “I always loved your Woody Allen comic strip, and I think it should become a book.” Kochman’s initial idea was for the book to be the same size as the strip, but that was ultimately dropped in favor of a larger format. In addition to 500 strips, all photographed from the original art (with scribblings and bits of tape intact), the book includes Hample’s foreword and a cartoon introduction by the late R. Buckminster Fuller, the visionary polymath.
While Inside Woody Allen was Hample’s only successful celebrity cartoon strip, Allen is not the only celebrity he has pitched to. At the age of 19, he approached radio personality Fred Allen with a proposal to do a comic strip based on a regular character on his show, Senator Claghorn (the ancestor of Warner Brothers’ Foghorn Leghorn). That strip never materialized, but Hample did travel to Hollywood to act as a stand-in for the movie “It’s a Joke, Son,” which was based on Claghorn.
Later on, he went to work for the advertising firm BBDO, and while he was there he convinced Al Capp, the creator of Li’l Abner, to allow his character Fearless Fosdick to be used in ads for Wildroot Cream-oil. “He said ‘It’s a good idea, but I don’t write a gag-a-day strip,’” Hample said, “so I wrote one, and he loved it.” Hample did have a syndicated strip of his own, Rich and Famous, which he had to drop for legal reasons shortly after he started Inside Woody Allen. (Because he had an exclusive contract with the syndicate that published Rich and Famous, he produced the first Inside Woody Allen strips under a pseudonym.) His career also included a stint as a guest artist on the Captain Kangaroo children’s show. Hample is currently working on a graphic novel aimed at teenage girls.
