Patrick McGilligan’s Woody Allen: A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham is a 700-page obsessive effort to praise filmmaker

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Patrick McGilligan’s Woody Allen: A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham is a 700-page obsessive effort to praise filmmaker

Allan Stewart Konigsberg got his first paid writing gig in the summer of 1952. The shy Brooklyn teenager mailed jokes into The New York Mirror by postcard and signed them with his anglicised nom de plume: Woody Allen. By the early 1960s, Allen was making a decent living as a standup comedian. He presented himself “as a brainy, neurotic Jewish bumbler, [and] a loser with women”, writes Patrick McGilligan in Woody Allen: A Travesty of a Mockery of…