My Dinner with André: Stuck at a Table with You

SteynonLine ^ | August 22, 2026 | Rick McGinnis

[Twotone]

For most of the decades that I've known about My Dinner with André, the film has been a kind of in-joke. Released at the height of the art house and repertory cinema heyday, it was alternately discussed as the most ridiculous, the oddest or the most formally disciplined film made at the time.

In the four and a half decades since it came out it's been embraced by both Boomers and Generation X as a gag that doubled as a secret handshake. The movie would be referenced in The Simpsons, The Far Side, Family Guy, Rick and Morty, Key & Peele and Waiting for Guffman, and parodied by Frasier, Community, Jim Henson, Animaniacs and Andy Kaufmann. It was a meme before we knew about memes.

For many people, including myself, it was one of those films that you thought you'd seen even if you never did. Every film fanatic has their blind spots – those handful of famous, great, canonical or infamous pictures they haven't managed to sit through. But as I've said before, I'm no film fanatic – my blind spots are many and, until this week, included My Dinner with André.

To even begin talking about My Dinner with André, you need to focus on its point of view character – the one whose name isn't in the title. Wallace Shawn, New York playwright and actor, plays Wally, New York playwright and actor. When the camera picks him out making his way through the grimy, pre-gentrified streets of New York's SoHo, he starts explaining to us how "the life of a playwright is tough... you work hard writing plays and nobody puts them on. You take up other lines of work to try to make a living – I became an actor – and people don't hire you."

---

TOPICS: History; TV/Movies
KEYWORDS: movies; wallaceshawn

[ClearCase_guy]

In the four and a half decades since it came out ...

Inconceivable!

[plain talk]

“My Dinner with André, the film has been a kind of in-joke. “

I went into the theatre to watch that movie. I was chuckling in the theatre at these NYC wannabe intellectuals. Woody Allen stuff without the comedy.

[nuconvert]

I’ve seen it a couple of times

[bankwalker]

[Twotone]

I think I tried to watch this years ago. I don’t think I made it through 15 minutes. After reading this, I might have to give it another try.

[webheart]

Woody Allen was the least funny comedian ever to be called a comedian.

[plain talk]

I was stuck in the theatre and was laughing at it but would have preferred to be somewhere else. Of course with streaming you can easily stop watching.

Certainly an excerpt of it would be of interest just to see a snapshot of stereotypical liberals in that time frame.

[ckilmer]

I saw the movie when it came out and I lived not too many blocks from that restaurant.

At the time everything about the conversation was in context, topical, on point and totally absorbing to me.

I tried to watch the same film a couple decades later after I moved to the suburbs of washington dc. What I saw was nothing. A conversation about nothing. Small talk with local references meaningful only to locals.

[Flaming Conservative]

I could listen to/read this brilliant man all day.