I grew up during Woody Allen’s not-so-memorable middle period—“Mighty Aphrodite,” “Deconstructing Harry,” “Sweet and Lowdown.” (When I was in the sixth grade, Allen filmed a scene from “Everyone Says I Love You” in a stately home down the block from my elementary school, in the Bronx, and I skipped class with my best friend to get his autograph.) But I was fortunate enough that my parents had an old tape of Allen’s album “Standup Comic: 1964-1968,” and our family often would listen to it on long car rides. Many of Allen’s anxious, absurdist one-liners—“I had a pain in the chestal area” (from the bit “Eggs Benedict”); “He made a remark” (“Mechanical Objects”); “Gertrude Stein punched me in the mouth” (“Lost Generation”)—became regular family sayings, and the routine about the moose was, and still is, an oft-invoked favorite.

So it set my chestal area aflutter to read yesterday on the New York Times’s ArtsBeat blog that Allen is maybe, possibly considering a return to standup comedy. Allen’s new movie, “Blue Jasmine,” includes the standup comics Andrew Dice Clay and Louis C.K. among its cast members, which prompted the Times reporter Dave Itzkoff, during a recent interview with the filmmaker about his many distinctive female characters, to inquire about the possibility of Allen returning to his nightclub roots.

Allen responded that the casting of Clay and C.K. was coincidental (he’s a huge fan of C.K., and found Clay to be a surprisingly sympathetic actor), but admitted that he has been “toying with the idea” of developing new standup material. He got inspired when he recently saw the comedian Mort Sahl, now eighty-six, perform a show at the Café Carlyle, at the Carlyle Hotel, where Allen plays regular gigs with his jazz band. “He’s not as rapid as he was when he was 35,” Allen told Itzkoff. “But all the stuff is still there. Watching him, I had the same feeling now, in 2013, as I had when I saw him in 1950-something. Of, ‘Hey, I’d like to get back onstage and do standup again.’ ”

A number of other famous comedians, including Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock, are planning highly anticipated returns to standup. Allen, who, at seventy-seven, still puts out roughly one new film per year, seems more circumspect—“Just getting together an hour of stuff to talk about would be a lot of work,” he told Itzkoff. In the meantime, though, you can find many of Allen’s old routines on YouTube, including the inimitable “Moose.” Below is a video of Allen performing the bit on English television in 1965; I’m of course partial to the album version.