WOODY Allen, writer? He has never really been anything else. After all, the professional career of Allan Konigsberg from the Bronx began in 1952 when he started flogging gags piecemeal to a New York Post columnist called Earl Wilson.

Soon after, he had graduated to a $20-per-week gig as supplier of jokes to a publicist, David Alber.

From there it was but a short skip up the ladder to the dizzy artistic heights of The Colgate Comedy Hour in 1955. As that pungent Hollywood mogul E Coli Biggs says to cash-strapped literary titan Flanders Mealworm in Allen's story 'This Nib for Hire': "Every Shakespeare's got to eat lest he croak ere he mint his magnum opus."

And Allen's magnum opus lies in half a century of artfully minted words. For all his devotion to moody Bergmanesque cinematography, savoury character turns from the likes of Michael Caine and Scarlett Johansson, and soundtracks sprinkled with the stardust of the Great American Songbook, his movies stand on the bedrock of his script as solidly as his beloved Manhattan on the granite that keeps its skyscrapers aloft. Woody without his own words is Harpo without Groucho, Rogers without Hammerstein, rye without pastrami. Even if the 1950s gag-machine and 1960s stand-up merchant had never directed a movie (which he first did by grafting his own screenplay onto an unsuspecting Japanese original to make What's Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966), he would merit an honourable mention in the glittering roll-call of New York literary humourists.

Allen has always multitasked with glee. It was 1966, the year of his directorial debut, that also saw him take an acting role in the first screen version of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, premiere his play Don't Drink the Water on Broadway and (crucially) sell his first comic sketch to the exacting editors of the New Yorker magazine. Over the decades, the New Yorker's pages would offer a regular home to his stories: in reality, surreal or satirical fantasias often rooted in the same collisions between high and low culture, or high ideals and low desires, that drive the screenplays of his films.

His first book of collected pieces, Getting Even, appeared in 1971;

Without Feathers followed in 1975 and Side Effects in 1980. So Mere Anarchy (just over half of whose 18 items originated in the New Yorker) breaks a quarter-centurylong drought for fans of Allen the literary prankster. It more than justifies the wait. Paula Pessary, the pneumatic starlet caught up in the spoof tragic drama of a Hollywood agents' lawsuit in the parody 'Caution, Falling Moguls', wistfully hopes that "with a teensy break I could lay siege to the hearts of a truly solid demographic". Allen's truly solid demographic can rejoice again.

Impatient critics have often accused Allen's movies of bypassing the dirt, diversity and even danger of the real Manhattan (in the 1970s and 1980s, if not now) in favour of a seductive bourgeois fantasy. He has admitted, "The New York in my films is the way I'd like it to be." But then he's no sort of social realist but an auteur who spins a witty, almost pastoral, dreamland of love and loss, sushi and cocktails, showtunes and therapy. This self-created world hovers somewhere above and beyond the grime and din of actual city streets.

His stories are equally delicious confections: virtuoso turns, tipsy on their own linguistic ingenuity.

They owe something to his idol SJ Perelman, the comic genius behind the Marx Brothers' best scripts, and to the poetic New York street patter of Damon Runyon's yarns.

But the erudite knockabout is all Allen's own. Here, Nietzsche writes a diet book and other heavyweight thinkers chip in:

"'Order like you are ordering for every human being on earth, ' Kant advises; but what if the man next to you doesn't eat guacamole?" A private eye hunts down the world's priciest white truffle: "It's said Goering was seconds away from eating it when news of Hitler's suicide put a damper on the meal."

A depressed Donald Duck gobbles Prozac and worries that "soon he would wind up on a Cantonese menu". And the Viennese cultural superstars of a century ago feature in a high-minded Sondheim-esque musical, 'Fun de Siecle', in which the voracious maneater Alam Mahler ("You name 'em, they rifled her thong") and Mr Ludwig Wittgenstein will duet with that ocean-deep show-stopper, 'Of Things We Cannot Speak We Must Remain Silent'.

To overanalyse Allen's skits would be to break a comic butterfly upon a wheel. All the same, a reader can't help noticing that (beyond a very Manhattan obsession with food) the stories riff repeatedly on the plight of the penurious highbrow scribbler forced to slum it in the lower reaches of showbiz. "I'm known as a facile man with description, " boasts the hapless Mealworm to the crooked studio boss, "particularly bucolic material a la Turgenev." It's a shtick that Allen has also perfected in his films, but the reality seems far more intriguing.

Allen was, and is, the tireless allround comic pro-gag writer, performer, script fixer and finally director, who crafted a character for himself as an intellectual acrobat surviving by guts and guile among the cigar-chewing philistines of Broadway and Hollywood. That persona may have began life as a canny mask. The pyrotechnic sparkle of Mere Anarchy suggests that . . . somewhere along the line . . . it all came true.