Needless to say, Copy-Editing the Culture is a great fan of Woody Allen films. One reason for this fandom has been Allen’s early mastery of the rules of punctuation in his titles. After the apprentice effort What’s New Pussycat? (missing, like the song it references, a direct-address comma), Allen redeemed himself and reached some measure of creative maturity with What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, a charming and, more to the point, brilliantly punctuated feature. From there, he was borne forward on a wave of good comma-ic energy. The year 1972 brought another direct-address victory in Play It Again, Sam, shortly followed by the creatively but rigorously punctuated Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex*/ *But Were Afraid To Ask. From there, the triumphs of Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Crimes and Misdemeanors, all beautifully and necessarily unpunctuated, seemed inevitable. At some point in the mid-1990s, though, curious things began to happen. First, Allen made a musical film called Everyone Says I Love You, using a title that shifts, with no punctuation, from third-person citation to first-person direct quotation. It also required Julia Roberts to sing. By 2000, the director had inflicted on the world something called Small Time Crooks—not, in fact, a film about dwarf ne’er-do-wells who steal time, although Copy-Editing the Culture might have found that premise more rewarding. Soon, the comic auteur had turned his Gotham-loving lens to Europe; recent years have brought such Continentally styled, bafflingly mispunctuated works as Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The golden age of Allen—for the grammar-minded moviegoer, at least—was over.