3/5/2023 0 Comments Neil simon![]() The writer’s no-nonsense work space, impersonal in its laid-back Southern Californian setting, is conspicuously empty (no secretary, no phone calls, no distractions) but intensely personal in the memorabilia that have, as Simon explains, “sort of gravitated” there over the years. These pages are the winnowing of sixteen hours of taped conversation in Simon’s office on the second floor of a Spanish colonial apartment building in the Beverly Hills flats-several miles, a thousand vertical feet, and a dozen social strata below the Bel Air hilltop home Simon shares with his wife Diane and their daughter Bryn. He is the author of more than twenty plays, including Come Blow Your Horn, Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, the Brighton Beach trilogy, Prisoner of Second Avenue, Plaza Suite, and Lost in Yonkers. Simon is not only skillful at his craft but prolific as well. Fielding, Twain, and Thurber can be savored in one’s lap, but verbal, visual humor, like misery, loves company. For Simon the art of humor is both communal (each member of the audience in league with all the other members of the audience) and collegial (playwright and performers in league with the audience-a relationship Simon will describe as a “shared secret”). ![]() Like the work of most writers of comedy, from Aristophanes to Woody Allen, Simon’s humor is written to be spoken. Comedy is hard.”īy any measure-quantity, quality, popular success, renown-Neil Simon is the preeminent purveyor of comedy in the last half of the twentieth century. Legend has it that on his deathbed the actor Edmund Gwenn answered director John Ford’s “What is dying like?” with a reflective, “Dying is easy. Interviewed by James Lipton Issue 125, Winter 1992
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