First published in English in a special 2000 issue of the journal Film and Philosophy dedicated to American filmmaker Woody Allen, this essay by Hösle (U. of Notre Dame) unpacks what is philosophically interesting about Allen's comedy. It explores the philosophical issues that Allen's comedy explicitly addresses, whether just as the subjects of puns and jokes or as the guiding themes of whole works, such as the identity problem in Zelig, the relation between reality and art in The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the objective value of morality in Crimes and Misdemeanors. It also aims to unpack the nature of Allen's comedy, which arguably "recovers a fullness of the comic that had been lost by high art ... for more than two millennia." Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)