Remembering the ‘Most Successful Comic Playwright Ever’

August 27, 2018 Michael Olesker

Playwright Neil Simon on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, June 26, 1980. (Joseph Del Valle/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

In the years 1965 to 1980, when the laughs kept coming, Neil Simon’s plays combined for roughly 9,000 Broadway performances. At one point, he had four hits running on Broadway at the same time. Awards poured in, and money, and so much acclaim that, by almost any measure, Simon was the most successful comic playwright ever.

And yet, there was this, too.

“I sit down to write,” he once told an interviewer, “and I keep hoping a grownup will come into the room and tell me how to do it.”

Any writer who ever saw that remark took solace from it. If Neil Simon could harbor such insecurities, anybody could. When he died Aug. 26 at 91, he’d unquestionably become the grownup in the room, a man who started his career going strictly for belly laughs and then, as a kind of second act, gave us texture as well.

His was the comedy of urban neurosis – of Jewish neurosis, you might say, though combining “Jewish” and “neurosis” sounds slightly redundant, no?

In the beginning, he was part of that legendary group of writers putting together the hilarious Sid Caesar weekly TV show. What a roster! There they were, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart and Lucille Kallen, Mel Tolkin and Woody Allen – and Simon.

Years later, he’d put that experience into a marvelous play called “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” about which I offer the following observation: My wife and I saw it on Broadway, with Nathan Lane starring as the Sid Caesar character.

We only stopped laughing long enough to breathe. The moment the play ended, we turned to each other and said, “We’ve got to see this again.” When the road company played at the Mechanic Theatre a few years later, we went back — and barely broke a smile.

Nathan Lane was gone, and so was the laughter. Howard Hesseman, best known as Dr. Johnny Fever on TV’s “WKRP in Cincinnati,” now had the lead role. The laugh lines laid there like a lokshen kugel.

The lesson was vivid: as a great philosopher noted, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.” It combines such a delicate mixture of language and acting, and character and situation, that it feels miraculous when it works but might fall apart if a single element fails.

And yet, across half a century, for many years regular as clock-work, there was one Simon comic hit after another. The early Broadway years brought such gems as “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Odd Couple” and “Sweet Charity.” There were movies, too, like “The Goodbye Girl” and “The Heartbreak Kid.”

But then the critics started grumbling. Laughter wasn’t enough, not any more. The culture was changing, and the public demanded more than punch lines. So Simon commenced an archaeological dig into his own past and gave us a remarkable series combining comedy and pathos: “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues,” “Broadway Bound,” “Lost in Yonkers.”

Across 40 years, 32 plays and 26 screenplays, and Tony Awards and a Pulitzer and countless, countless laughs, he was, by any measure, the grownup in any room full of writers.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.