Standup in Paris

The circus of nostalgia at the center of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris is populated by the post-WWI Lost Generation and its European contemporaries. Interestingly, this group seems to have interested Allen decades before making this film. Take this clip of his standup from the ‘60s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEsFbeqiD8w
I don’t want to read too much into this joke and kill it, but humor me for a moment here; we can definitely tease out a few parallels between Allen’s yarn and Midnight in Paris. In the joke, Allen plays an American outsider in Europe who somehow falls in with this particular cadre of intellectuals. By the end, it’s pretty clear both parties are quite frankly ridiculous: Hemingway’s a brute, Picasso bizarre, the Fitzgerald’s are drunks, and Stein scoffs at any and all art that comes her way. And they laugh about it, but ultimately Woody gets on everyone’s and I mean everyone’s nerves and exits stage left.
Now compare this with Gil, who obviously fills the classic “Woody Allen” role that recurs in works like Annie Hall and Take the Money and Run. The protagonist qua Allen plays along with the Parisian fantasy world of the Lost Generation though never quite fits in with the pack (“You ever hunt?” the fictionalized Hemingway asks Gil. “Only for bargains,” he quips). But by movie’s end, he realizes the whole thing is a farce—the punch line here, though, becomes a more existential, revelatory climax.
I won’t say that Midnight in Paris follows Allen’s standup exactly. But like the initial joke’s conclusion, we are unable by the film’s finale to take any character seriously—not the manic protagonist, his fiancée, the Lost Generation, the founder of Cubism, or even King Louis XIV. The entire thing proves to be a giant joke and, the enlightening punch line reached, a liberated Gil can finally stroll off into the rain-speckled Parisian night and let the credits roll.