The world depicted in the American comedies of the 1920s and 1930s underwent a radical shift in the postwar era, necessitating an equally fundamental change in the dominant modes of film comedy. While the Marx Brothers films engage in a certain amount of more open-ended parody (particularly in their more “anarchic” films like Duck Soup), the primary mode of their humor is satirical. It is directed at particular institutions, milieus, professions, and social classes. In Woody Allen's films, on the other hand, although a good deal of direct social and political satire remains, the dominant mode is parodic.

Allen's filmic oeuvre is often cited as the paradigmatic example of comic postmodernism, and Allen's work as an intertextual or metareferential filmmaker has attracted the attention of numerous commentators. From his first film, What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1967), a re-edited and redubbed version of a Japanese James Bond-type thriller, through more fully realized parodies such as Take the Money and Run (1969), Stardust Memories (1980), Zelig (1983), and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Allen has made consistent use of parodic elements in his films. Yet at the same time we can read Allen as a highly effective social satirist, a filmmaker determined to expose the hypocrisies and excesses of contemporary American life and to analyze the foibles of various cultural milieus.