Pod-Canon: the Cathartic Brilliance of Double Threat's "On a Zoom Call With Woody Allen"

Change can be scary even when it’s positive change. That might explain why it took me so long to start listening to Double Threat, Tom Scharpling’s new podcast with Julie Klausner despite Klausner and Scharpling being two of my favorite podcasters and people ever and desperately missing The Best Show something awful even though its most recent hiatus has just begun. 

But when I saw an episode titled “Woody Allen on a Zoom Call” I knew that I could not hold off any longer. I’d never listened to Alec Baldwin’s podcast Here’s the Thing. The mere fact that Alec Baldwin had a podcast where he pretended to be smart in that NPR purr of his amused me enough. To actually listen to it seemed like a bridge too far. 

I similarly have never listened to any recent interviews with Allen because the man makes my skin crawl. I can think of few things less appealing than listening to Alec Baldwin jerk off Woody Allen through the medium of podcasting but I also can’t imagine a better context for experiencing this trainwreck than through the gleeful mockery of Klausner and Scharpling.

In his introduction, Baldwin gushes of his longstanding reverence for his guest, “I’ve hosted parties where the only activity is just watching Broadway Danny Rose together.” 

Baldwin of course means that he’s thrown a party where people watched Broadway Danny Rose but his awkward phrasing suggests that he throws LOTS of Broadway Danny Rose parties. Scharpling and Klausner run with this idea, imagining a world where Alec Baldwin hosts weekly Broadway Danny Rose parties where attendees dress as their favorite characters (I would probably go as Lou Canova, the lounge singer played Nick Apollo Forte) and are forbidden from socializing or talking because the only activity allowed is “just watching Broadway Danny Rose together”, without worrying about rude, thoughtless little pigs ruining everything.

Baldwin’s decision to awkwardly shoe-horn the molestation allegations into his introduction alongside effusive praise about Allen’s movies “having some of the funniest lines in modern cinema and, though he denies it, profound insight into psychology and the human condition” and talk of Broadway Danny Rose parties registers as unintentionally comic.

#NameaMoreIconicDuo

There simply are some things too serious to be handled in such an off-handed manner. Child molestation is one of them. You can’t introduce a guest as a legendary filmmaker, personal friend, hero and three time collaborator (who could possibly forget Blue Jasmine and the other two movies Baldwin made with Allen?), accused child molester and the author of a new memoir, Apropos of Nothing without accidentally highlighting the ugliness you’re going out of your way to bury, or at least downplay. 

Baldwin obviously felt a moral and professional obligation to acknowledge that the man whose posterior he is about to tenderly smooch has been accused of unforgivable crimes, perhaps because the book Allen is promoting deals extensively with the allegations. Yet he also seemed to feel that “my guest is an accused child molester” is a statement that can be rushed past in a mad hurry to make the possible child molester feel as comfortable as possible. 

Baldwin clearly, confidently asserts that he does not think that his guest is guilty of child molestation, which is similarly not something you should ever find in the introduction to a worshipful podcast interview. 

Allen has a reputation as one of pop culture’s deep thinkers, a brainy intellectual forever contemplating life’s great mysteries. Allen wants you to know that couldn’t be further from the truth. Allen portrays himself here as a barely literate jock who grew up playing baseball and reading comic books and dreamed of playing centerfield for the New York Yankees yet somehow stumbled backwards into becoming one of the most venerated artists of the twentieth century because he was good at writing gags.  

Allen goes so overboard in his attempt to depict himself as an overalls-clad, book-hating scamp who’d much rather be devouring Superman comics and playing stickball in the street than messing with books or school that you half expect him to tell Baldwin that he was actually the model and inspiration for Dennis the Menace, to brag in that deeply imitable nasal whine of his, “You know Alec, Hank Ketcham was actually, you know, my neighbor in Brooklyn when I was a child and I’ll never forget, he’d say, ‘You’re gonna put somebody’s eye out with that slingshot, ya damn kid!’ I used to call him Mr. Wilson just to get a rise out of him, and originally the comic strip was supposed to Woody the Menace but they had to change it for legal reasons. Also, they made him a little blonde Christian boy whereas I was always swearing at Kethcham in Yiddish, which really drove him wild”, as he was not a friend or a fan of the Jews, you know, as a lot of people were not at the time.”

You’ve got to give Allen credit: his appearance here backs up his assertion that he possesses no profound insight into psychology or the human condition. The Allen of this Zoom call is almost impressively shallow and superficial, not to mention mostly monosyllabic. He’s no philosopher or intellectual or brainiac. He’s just a guy, and not even a particularly impressive or smart one at that. It’s almost as if Allen is going out of his way to be as boring as possible to support his bizarre conception of himself as a deeply uninteresting everyman.

“Woody Allen On a Zoom Call” is a meeting of the minds between two exemplars of unexamined white male privilege and entitlement with nothing to say. It finds Baldwin sounding less like Terry Gross than Chris Farley on the Chris Farley Show Saturday Night Live sketches where Farley would gush awkwardly over his guest’s greatness in a manner that only occasionally took the form of actual questions. 

In a typically surreal exchange, Allen expresses slack-jawed amazement that Baldwin referred to him as “Mr. Allen” when they worked together. Allen says that Baldwin is the only actor he’s ever worked with him who referred to him in such a formal way. It seems to boggle Allen’s mind that Baldwin would treat an ordinary Joe like himself, a real everyday schmuck with a mere four Academy Awards to his name, in a deferential fashion, instead of referring to him as “W-Dog” or “Woodman” or some other ragingly informal pet nickname. 

Who could possibly forget, or remember, this?

It’s VERY easy to believe the flabbergasted Allen’s contention that in over a half-century as a towering cultural figure who has been nominated for more screenwriting Oscars than any other writer in history not a single actor or actress other than Baldwin was ever polite enough to call him by his last name when they could greet him with, “How’s your hammer hanging, W-Money? You keeping it wet?” on set every morning. 

The malicious joy Scharpling and Klausner take in their dueling Allens is infectious and palpable but Baldwin at this point might just be an even juicier target and more ridiculous human being. On this very strange piece of audio, Baldwin, who is actor-smart but has deluded himself into thinking he’s genuinely intelligent, attains an Eddie Haskell/Kevin Eubanks level of obsequiousness. The world may have battered and bruised and bashed Allen’s enormous ego, downgrading his status from “revered giant of American cinema” to “problematic, semi-cancelled creep” but he’s as iconic and legendary as ever to Baldwin, who clearly would love to have him as the guest of honor at his next Broadway Danny Rose party.

Allen is still big. It’s the pictures that have gotten so small that they seem more like mean-spirited jokes than real movies. This extends to Allen awkwardly plugging his latest directorial effort Rifkin’s Festival, a movie he filmed in Europe, a continent with a less visceral hatred for him at this point in his life and career than his own, with Wally Shawn and Gina Gershon. 

Say what you will about Woody Allen but Wallace Shawn is still willing to work with him. And I’m guessing he could probably get Alec Baldwin for an upcoming film as well.

Allen’s idea of promoting his new movie is to unsteadily assert that it “came out better than I expected” and is “one of the pictures that I felt affection for.” Self-promotion clearly does not come naturally to him but his half-hearted spiel for Rifkin’s Festival is a reminder of the depths to which his career has fallen. 

Allen is so famously aloof that he hasn’t considered attending the Academy Awards worth his time. Yet on this tragicomic and also just plain hilarious call he’s a has-been with a rapidly fading career reduced to shilling for his latest projects on a friend’s shitty podcast because he’s too toxic and radioactive for the rest of the world. 

Allen was such a God to me growing up that there’s something deeply cathartic about listening to the podcasters tear him down to size. “Woody Allen On a Zoom Call” invites us to laugh long and hard and unashamedly at Alec Baldwin and Woody Allen, two oblivious buffoons whose complete lack of self-awareness and self-consciousness make them perfect targets for satire. 

I know that Rifkin’s Festival is real. But my brain refuses to believe it’s genuine, just as it is exceedingly skeptical about the existences of such late-period Allen efforts as A Rainy Day in New York, Magic in the Moonlight, Cafe Society and You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger. 

Have you ever encountered any of those movies? I didn’t think so. The phrase “this reminds me of something that happened in A Rainy Day in New York” has never been uttered. 

Allen professes to think his public image is a colossal misunderstanding: because he wears glasses people think he’s a nerd and an egghead when really he’s a dumb jock who loves football and baseball and wanted to hit dingers rather than write zingers. I would argue, however, that the multiple Ingmar Bergman homages Allen has made are a better indication that he thinks of himself as an intellectual and highbrow artist than the corrective lenses he wears for his poor eyesight. 

Scharpling and Klausner have a blast dream-casting a new Allen film featuring the likes of Naked Cowboy, Bam Margera, the dancing baby from Ally McBeal, the talking baby from the E-Trade commercial and T.J Miller. Their riffs get wilder and wilder and more absurd until they’re imagining Baldwin’s self-satisfied baritone coming out of Cookie Monster’s cookie-hating father.

In the last clip, an uncharacteristically tongue-tied Baldwin blurts out, “I want to say to you that, um, what I really wanted to say to you was, you get back out there and you keep making movies, because you really are just such an important part of people’s lives. You have made life worth living.” 

Baldwin rambles on but the hosts, in a Hollywood Handbook move, decide to end the podcast right then and there because nothing they could say could be funnier or more utterly damning towards Allen and Baldwin than the host of Match Game telling an international pariah and suspected child molester in a bottomless professional free-fall that his terrible, late-period directorial efforts “have made life worth living.” 

Baldwin is so nakedly sycophantic that it becomes poignant. “You have made life worth living” is only slightly less embarrassing, personal and embarrassingly personal than ending the interview with, “Will you be my dad?”

Allen and Baldwin can never be mocked often, or viciously enough by two podcasters who are such an important part of people’s lives like myself and whose work, individually and collectively, have made life worth living. 

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