Woody Allen considering a return to stand-up comedy

Los Angeles: Woody Allen is considering a return to stand-up comedy after staying away from stage for more than four decades. The Hollywood icon started his journey as a comedy writer in the 1950s before leaving stand-up comedy for a career in movie direction.

Allen, whose latest film ‘Blue Jasmine’ opened in theatres recently, became nostalgic about his stage days while watching a another legendary star, Mort Sahl, perform recently, the Variety reported "Mort Sahl is the guy who inspired me to go on stage for the first time in my life, and when I saw him the other night, I had that feeling again of, `I can do this`. He was as great as I remembered. So I thought, `Gee, it would be nice to get up there and do that again’!" said Allen. The 77-year-old director has started to look through his old stand-up notes to help him develop a new routine but believes it would involve lot of work. "It`s a lot of work. You have to put together an hour of laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh. You can`t dawdle. In a film script, if there`s a laugh here and there, but people interacting in a meaningful way, it`s good. But, onstage, you come out and you`ve got to get a laugh, and then another and another." ‘Blue Jasmine’, Allen`s 48th film as writer-director, stars Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin, Sally Hawkins and Peter Sarsgaard. Tennessee Williams`s Pulitzer Prize-winning play ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ is the influence behind this film. The director, who continues to make one film a year, is next making a romantic comedy set in the 1920s. The film stars Colin Firth, Emma Stone, Marcia Gay Harden and Jacki Weaver. PTI