Born in 1935 as Allan Stewart Konigsberg, Woody Allen was on the rise in 1965, busy in London and Paris with two pictures, What’s New Pussycat and Casino Royale. He disliked both projects because neither was under his control. He was eager for new outlets, and when a British company called Rediffusion invited him to make a guest appearance on a new television program, Allen accepted. Called Hippodrome, the show was broadcast in both the UK and the US. During his appearance, Allen boxed a kangaroo.
Allen no doubt endured other humiliating moments, but this one must have stood out. The bizarre episode is not mentioned in David Evanier’s biography, which discusses Allen’s years in Paris and London (Woody: The Biography [2015], pp. 130-35). However, the Hippodrome story has recently been told by Graham McCann, and you can see the fight on YouTube (“It seemed a good idea at the time #1: Woody Allen versus a boxing kangaroo,” British Comedy Guide, March 12, 2023. Go to https://www.comedy.co.uk/features/comedy_chronicles/woody-allen-versus-a-boxing-kangaroo. For the video, search YouTube for “Woody Allen boxing kangaroo”).
At the time when Rediffusion was searching for programming, the spectacle of humans fighting animals drew big audiences. Someone suggested kangaroo boxing. McCann writes, “Amazingly, the bosses at Rediffusion thought that this was an excellent idea, and the result was that a real live kangaroo was put in a ring opposite a real live Woody Allen, the smartest American stand-up comedian of the time, inside a British TV studio, and a 'fight' was duly filmed.” Both wore gloves.
Allen came onto the set wearing red shorts and a white top. “It’s generally known to the public that I’m a guy who can handle his fists pretty good,” Allen joked, talking like a boxer if not looking like one. Then he announced that he would “fight the Australian light heavyweight champion.”
Once the fight began, Allen showed that he also knew how to move like a boxer. He was quick; his footwork looks like a practiced parody of boxing form. Allen had successfully played several sports in school but had not made athleticism part of his comic persona. He and the kangaroo kept their distance but Allen tagged the animal three for times before the kangaroo rushed him. The kangaroo’s trainer, acting as referee, kept pushing both Allen and the animal into the fight. Suddenly the kangaroo kicked the trainer out of the ring, a gratifying moment for viewers, and Allen took the opportunity to escape through the ropes. He could not have been amused at the risk his managers had encouraged him to take.
I stumbled on this remarkable episode when I was looking for information about Allen and boxing. I had recently seen Zelig, his 1983 movie in which boxing comes up twice. The film has been described by Peter Tonguette as Allen’s “boldest, most unexpected achievement.” That is saying something, since it was number seventeen in a film count that now stretches beyond 60 (“‘Zelig’: Woody Allen as No One and Everyone,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 11, 2023). I wondered what Allen had to say about the sport.
Zelig is satire, not a movie that warms the heart or even engages the brain, although the film has its brainy side and its brainy fans. A step up from earlier works, such as Take the Money and Run (1969), Zelig, like that picture and many other early Allen movies, is a series of one-note jokes, funny enough, to be sure, but fundamentally incoherent, not even trying to form a plot. Jason Bailey writes that Take the Money and “all of his pre-Annie Hall output” should be viewed as “a ‘Woody Allen picture,’ a vehicle for a defined comedic character, exacerbated by its placement in unexpected or incongruent situations.” Zelig is post-Annie Hall (1977), but Bailey’s description applies to it as well (The Ultimate Woody Allen Film Companion [Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2014], p. 14).
Leonard Zelig is a Jazz Age figure who is obsessed with conformity, a chameleon “capable of both maneuvering himself into unlikely settings and undergoing physical metamorphoses to suit each occasion,” Tonguette writes. “Depending on who is standing beside him, Zelig adopts guises ranging from doctor to gangster to aristocrat.” He becomes black around blacks and Native around Native Americans. He is large when he is around large people, Jewish when he is around Jews (a nice joke), and so on. At Yankee Stadium he impersonates a batter. In Chicago he becomes a gangster and then reappears as a member of a nightclub orchestra. In Chinatown, he becomes a drug addict. (A friend has reminded me that in the ring with the kangaroo Allen sometimes hopped around like on, a hint of things to come.)
Zelig also makes motivated choices to change. Born into an upper-class family, Zelig becomes a Democrat, we are told, so that he can be “one of the crowd.” He becomes a celebrity and meets the rich and famous, including Jack Dempsey, who was famous if not rich. Boxing fits Zelig’s populist ambitions, and Dempsey was a populist himself.
Zelig attracts the attention of a psychiatrist named Eudora Nesbitt Fletcher. Her character is part of an inside joke about Allen’s partnership with Mia Farrow (this was their second film together and the first in which they were a couple). Dr. Fletcher is named after a school principal whom Allen is said to have despised. Evanier notes that her role as a woman who saves Zelig is unusual. In other works, the ones who need saving are women (pp. 240-41). Dr. Fletcher believes that Zelig is seriously ill and in need of treatment. Others think he is simply a freak.
No matter which view they take, people everywhere discuss Zelig. He is denounced at a mass rally. Because he can shift his race and ethnicity, he is especially feared by Klu Klux Klan. Zelig is the subject of “The Changing Man,” a movie in which the actress portraying Eudora longs for “some technique” that can rescue him from the media craze that has swallowed him (there are songs and dances about him; dolls and pens bear his image). Zelig meets Presidents Hoover and Coolidge. In France, intellectuals love him and admire him as a symbol of everything (at 23 minutes in).
In the first boxing reference, Zelig is photographed with the young and handsome Jack Dempsey (23:19). Around the heavyweight champion, we expect Zelig to appear as a boxer, and, in a way, he does. He sits next to Dempsey on an outside stairway located in what the voiceover describes as the boxer’s training camp. Zelig shows the image only in close-up. The full image (below) shows careful composition, as all the altered images in the film do. Only half of Zelig’s body is on the stairway; the other floats in air. Dempsey raises his left hand, gesturing to Zelig, as if presenting him to the viewer. (I have looked through dozens and dozens of Getty images of Dempsey but not found this picture or any in which Dempsey sits on stairs out of doors.)
Some viewers consider this image inaccurate. One observer noted in IMDb that Dempsey’s last fight was in 1927, whereas the film takes place in 1928. There is no anachronism, however. After he retired from the ring following his second loss to Gene Tunney in 1927, Dempsey gave exhibition matches. In 1931 and 1932 Dempsey was fighting again; he needed the money. Dempsey also worked with the famous Tex Richards as a boxing promoter (Dempsey by the Man Himself, Considine and Slocum, pp. 210-11). The movie’s reference to Dempsey as a boxer who might be in a training camp is plausible.
Zelig is celebrated in Hollywood and is seen at the Hearst Castle (San Simeon, Cal.) where he meets the cowboy actor Tom Mix. He clowns with Mix’s hat, which is too large. We can safely infer that Zelig is also unable to fill the cowboy’s boots (51:28). When he meets Bobby Jones (co-founder of the Masters Tournament) on a golf course, Zelig kicks the ball a few feet, showing himself once again to be a man not up to the task. Similar humor, based on ineptness, informs the scene with Dempsey, with Zelig in unbuckled headgear, looking goofy next to the radiant boxing star.
The second boxing episode involves two boxers. Short films show Zelig meeting a black boxer and a white boxer. Like the golf course clip, these films were treated so that they appear to have been made in the 1920s—that is, in the present of the film.
These scenes do not specify the boxers’ identities or the location of their gyms. Presumably both men were actors or unknown boxers found in random footage; they are not named. Unlike the practiced Dempsey, these two men do not play to the camera, whereas Zelig, the celebrity in the scene, does. Zelig makes no effort to look or act like a boxer in either meeting.
First we see Zelig, wearing a suit, in a gym with a black boxer (53 minutes in). They shake hands and talk briefly. Then Zelig seems to realize that he ought to show interest in boxing. He assumes a modified boxing stance, forming fists in imitation of the boxer. But no action ensues.
The next scene, slightly longer, pairs Zelig with a white boxer who is pounding an Everlast heavy bag (53:20). Wearing the same suit, Zelig stands behind the bag and braces it. Each time the boxer lands a shot, the bag moves and pushes Zelig back. He seems amused that he cannot keep his footing or resist the boxer’s punch. As on the golf course, Zelig enjoys being inept and out of place—that is, he revels in difference. If he can’t do it, what is the harm? How important can it be? But we have to wonder why Allen bothered to have Zelig show up in a boxing gym and approach the boxers, if not to show some interest in them and in the sport.
Fitting in with a boxer is not the same as not fitting in with a golf pro or a movie star. Boxing puts more on the line than golf and acting do. Dempsey provided the glamour of celebrity, but celebrity is often seen in Zelig. Zelig meets people famous for their talents and accomplishments, people like Dempsey. Zelig himself, however, is famous only for being famous because he can look like other people. Apart from chameleonism, he has no accomplishments, and chameleonism is something that happened to him, not something he achieved.
The scenes with the two nameless boxers make a point that is not otherwise apparent in Zelig. Seen working in their gym—and who else is seen at work in Zelig?—they represent boxing itself, with its quiet anonymity and its demanding routines. These men don’t evoke celebrities like Dempsey. They have nothing in common with the thousands we see watching parades and waving at the celebrities Zelig meets, or sitting at home listening to the radio.
The boxers, however, are at work. Dempsey is in a training camp. These men represent thousands of boxers who, in their gyms and camps, hit the bags, do their drills, and hone their skills. It is safe to assume that they then go home to rest before another day of hard work.
In life, I know, a curious non-boxer, a man like Zelig, will drop into a boxing gym. He seems to want a taste of the sport, or perhaps he wants to have a little of its legendary toughness rub off on him—that is, he wants to be like the boxers or at least say he talked to a boxing coach. This, it is safe to say, is a plausible motive for Zelig’s appearance in the gyms. He seems to be aspirational, and he shows intention and motive in other appearances.
The anonymous boxers remind us of the gap divides boxers from men like Zelig and other men who do not box. Boxers stand alone, exposed, on display. Unlike few other athletes (wrestlers and Mixed Martial Arts fighters are exceptions), boxers compete one on one, without devices like racquets or balls or nets. No team shares the glory of the boxer’s victory or the sting of his defeat.
If Allen did not want to draw attention to boxing, it is hard to understand why Zelig points to the sport three times and to the unglamorous side of sport twice. I think he did so because he knew, even if not from his own very limited ring experience, that boxers are the opposite of chameleons. There is no room in the ring for fitting in or for protective coloration. The boxer seeks difference and visibility. He wants to fight and to win. Boxing demands confrontation, competition, and sacrifice. Nothing could be less like Zelig’s neurotic need to be liked and to fit in than these three attributes. He does not want to stand out. Boxers do.
The picture with Dempsey shows that Zelig is not relaxed and masterful, like the Champ. Nor is he assured and welcoming, like the black boxer; or powerful and focused, like the boxer who pounds the heavy bag. All three men stand their ground, ready to be challenged.
In his suit and tie and his glasses, Zelig is a visitor from another world. He can impersonate jazz musicians, French symbolists, and many other types because all of them have some quality that Zelig himself already possesses. But he cannot impersonate a boxer. He can’t fake the easy glamour of Dempsey or earn a place sitting next to him by donning headgear. He can’t fit into a boxing gym. A man can’t box wearing glasses and a three-piece suit. Zelig cannot, as they used to say, come up to the mark as bare-knuckled boxers had to do and face one another on either side of the line that divided the ring.
The boxing scenes expose the flightiness and frivolity of both Zelig the man and Zelig the movie. Zelig can’t resist or defend himself. He can’t spar, fight, compete, or struggle. Next to three strong and confident men—men in short supply in the film and in Allen’s world—he is a puddle of weakness and self-regard.
In his Journal essay, Tonguette comments that Allen saw Zelig “as a chance to make serious points about the risk that social pressures pose to individuality” and to avoid “the specific danger of abandoning one’s own true self, in an effort to be liked.” With due respect to Tonguette, I find these claims preposterous. If Zelig has a “true self,” the movie does a good job of omitting the evidence. But it quietly puts the “true self” of boxers on display. Nobody gets into the ring “in an effort to be liked,” and nobody who boxes has an identity crisis. Competition, confrontation, and sacrifice teach boxers who we are. They are paths to “one’s own true self.” If Zelig had such a self, there would have been no joke to build a movie around. Had Allen had such a self, there would have been no Zelig.
Allen fought the kangaroo less than 15 years before he made Zelig. The video shows that Allen could act like a boxer. When he made Zelig, Allen created a hero who could fit in with most people but not act like or fit in with boxers. Allen knew enough about the look of boxing to have made Zelig more at home in the gym.
I wish Allen had invested some of his boxing knowledge in these episodes. Dempsey and the other boxers could have been seen with Zelig, at the height of his chameleon powers, as men who had something Zelig also had. It would have been good for fans to see Allen’s sporty side. On the other hand, as Allen portrays him, Zelig makes an instructive un-boxer, uncertain, unable to be forceful or assertive, unashamed that he looks silly and out of place. The only thing more unlikely than Allen boxing a kangaroo is Zelig boxing a boxer. Any boxer viewing these moments in Zelig should feel healthy, happy, and whole in ways neither Allen or the avatar he created could approach.
Thanks Allen. Fascinating stuff. I had never heard of his boxing a kangaroo! Hilarious. Bouncing and imitating the movements of the Kangaroo. lol. Here's a link for anyone who wants to see it https://youtu.be/dPqvqPIGFts?si=iZNVM7lU6N97vJiL
Unique perspective. I haven't seen Zelig in ages. But I think you're right, Zelig is the anti-boxer... and so is Allen in many ways. My dad couldn't stand him. I think he has his moments.