Raised in Brooklyn, New York, Alvy Singer grows up to become a well-known comedian. As an adult, he encounters relationship problems with his girl friend, Annie Hall, when she starts to withdraw her affection. Annie claims she is only going through a phase and reminds him of how he used to be “hot” for Allison, but then his ardor cooled off. Alvy recalls meeting Allison, an ex-girl friend, at a 1956 benefit performance for Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign. By 1964, Alvy has lost interest in the relationship. While making love to Allison, he obsesses over conflicting evidence related to the John F. Kennedy assassination, and Allison accuses him of using his fixation to avoid intimacy with her. Alvy reflects that there is some truth in what Allison says—that, like the old Groucho Marx joke, he really does not want to be in any club that would have him as a member. In a happier moment in their relationship, Alvy and Annie Hall vacation at the seashore, and delight in each other’s company as they attempt to cook live lobsters for dinner. Alvy asks Annie if he is her first love. She says no, and reminisces about old boyfriends. When Alvy suggests that Annie is lucky he came along, she responds, “Well, la-dee-dah." Alvy is unimpressed with her choice of words, and Annie suggests that he prefers intellectual women because he married two of them. However, Alvy’s memories of his earlier marriages are not particularly happy. He recalls meeting Annie in 1975, on a tennis date with his friend, Rob, and Rob’s girl friend, Janet. Annie, a sometime actress from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, offers Alvy a ride home and invites him up to her apartment for a drink. She makes him uncomfortable when she observes that he is what her “Grammy” Hall would call a “real Jew,” and goes on to explain that her grandmother hates Jews. As they engage in a pretentious conversation about Annie’s photography, they are both distracted by their own insecure inner monologues. Annie reveals that she is auditioning to sing at a local nightclub on Saturday night. Alvy tells Annie he would love to hear her sing and she overcomes her shyness by allowing him to attend. At the nightclub, the audience is restless. Afterward, Annie is embarrassed, believing that the crowd hated her. Alvy assures her that she has a good voice and the audience loved her. He proposes that they kiss before dinner, to get over the awkwardness of a first kiss. The cultural divide between them is revealed at a delicatessen when he orders corned beef on rye, and she orders pastrami on white bread. They make love that night, and afterward Annie smokes marijuana. Soon she moves in with Alvy, although he believes she should maintain a separate apartment. Later, at the beach house, Annie wants to smoke a joint before making love, and suggests that Alvy might not need a psychiatrist if he resorted to marijuana. Upset that Annie needs to get high in order to make love, he takes the joint away. As he starts to kiss her, Annie’s bored spirit separates from her body and searches for her sketchpad so she can draw while her dispirited body has sex with Alvy. When she argues that she needs marijuana to feel comfortable, he again tells her that it upsets him. As a comedian, he is not interested in getting laughs from people who are high, because they are always laughing anyway. Early in his own career, Alvy was reluctant to perform and wrote material for other comics, but now he has overcome his fears and is successful. One night, he performs at the University of Wisconsin and Annie is impressed with his reception by the students. She tells him she is beginning to understand some of the cultural references in his act. Alvy and Annie go to Chippewa Falls to spend Easter with her family. The anti-Semitic Grammy Hall cannot help but see Alvy as an orthodox Hasidic Jew—with spring curls, a beard, and a black suit and hat. Alvy makes a mental comparison between the Hall family’s dinner table etiquette and that of his own raucous New York Jewish family. Later, Annie’s brother, Duane Hall, invites Alvy into his room and confesses that when he is driving at night he sometimes has the urge to drive head-on into oncoming cars. Later, Duane drives Alvy and Annie to the airport, and Alvy is petrified with anxiety. Back in New York, Annie accuses Alvy of following her. He denies the charge and says that he was spying on her and saw her kissing David, her Russian literature professor. Later, Annie enters into psychoanalysis, and notes that Alvy’s last name is “Singer” and that she wants to be a singer. She accuses Alvy of not wanting to be in a committed relationship because he does not think she is smart enough. He counters that encouraging her to take adult education courses is a way to broaden her horizons. He then contradicts himself by saying that such classes are empty and shallow. After Alvy and Annie have broken up, he muses that he has always been attracted to the wrong kind of women. His friend, Rob, introduces him to Pam, a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine. Although they have little in common, they end up having sex and Pam describes the experience as Kafkaesque. During their post-coital conversation, Annie calls Alvy for help, and he rushes over to her apartment. Arring there at 3:00 a.m., he discovers the crisis is merely that there are two spiders in her bathroom. After Alvy kills the spiders, Annie tells him she misses him and asks him to stay. She inquires if someone was in his room when she called, but he denies it. Later, in bed, Annie suggests that she and Alvy never break up again, and they are reunited. After singing again at the nightclub, Annie is approached by record producer Tony Lacey, who invites her and Alvy to his room at the Hotel Pierre. At Alvy’s insistence, Annie turns down the invitation. Instead, he takes her to watch the somber documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, about French anti-Semitism during World War II. With their respective analysts, Annie and Alvy come to similar but different conclusions. She views a day they spent in Brooklyn as the last time they had fun together. He feels that they never have any laughs anymore. Asked how often they have sex, Alvy says, “Hardly ever—three times a week,” while Annie responds, “Constantly! Three times a week.” At a get-together with friends, Annie and Alvy are offered cocaine. Annie urges Alvy to try it, and mentions that they will soon be going to California. Alvy dips the tip of his finger in the white powder, puts it to his nose, then sneezes into the container, sending the drug up in a puff around the room. In California to present an award, Alvy becomes offended when Rob instructs an editor to add fake laughs to the latest episode of his hit comedy series. Alvy is suddenly taken ill and is unable to appear on the awards show. Rob takes him and Annie to Tony Lacey’s Christmas party, and Tony suggests to Annie that they record an album in about six weeks. Flying back to New York, Annie realizes that she liked California, and Alvy that he enjoyed flirting with other women. Each fears breaking up for fear of hurting the other, but ultimately they decide to separate. Later, leaving a movie theater alone, Alvy mentions to himself that he misses Annie, and a passing couple stops to tell him that she is living in California with Tony Lacey. Another stranger asks why he doesn’t go out with other women. Attempting to prepare lobsters at the beach house with another woman, things are not the same as with Annie, and the magic is gone. Alvy calls Annie on the phone, saying that he wants her to come back. In desperation, he travels to Los Angeles and calls her from the airport. They agree to meet at a Sunset Strip health food café, where Alvy asks Annie to marry him and she refuses. Being a New Yorker, Alvy is unused to driving. Leaving the restaurant in his rented car, he smashes into several other cars and ends up in jail. Back in New York, Alvy watches a rehearsal of his new play. Two actors recite dialogue from his last meeting with Annie, but art does not imitate life: the girl in the play agrees to return to New York with the protagonist. In the rehearsal hall, Alvy turns to the audience and says he wanted to have his first play turn out perfectly, the way life seldom does. He mentions running into Annie again, after she returned to New York and moved in with another man. He saw her coming out of a screening of The Sorrow and the Pity and considered it a personal triumph. Sometime later, they had lunch and talked about old times and then parted. He is reminded of an old joke about a guy who goes to a psychiatrist complaining that his brother thinks he is a chicken. The doctor asks, “Why don’t you turn him in?” and the man replies, “Because we need the eggs.” Alvy recognizes that relationships are difficult, but we keep putting ourselves into them “because we need the eggs.”