Neil Simon, Broadway’s king of comedy, dies at 91

Neil Simon, the Pulitzerand Tony-winning author of plays such as “The Odd Couple,” “Barefoot in the Park” and “Lost in Yonkers,” who died Aug. 26 at 91, was often called the world’s most popular playwright after Shakespeare.

Time magazine proclaimed him the “patron saint of laughter.” His shows, with an arsenal of sarcastic wit, became highly entertaining staples of high school and community theaters, and they popped up on stages as far away as Beijing and Moscow. But mostly, he dominated Broadway like no other playwright of the past half-century.

Hardly a year passed from 1961 to 1993 without a new production by Simon, whose legacy was a colossally successful run of comedies and comic dramas on topics such as romance, adultery, divorce, sibling rivalry, cancer and the fear of aging. Several are regarded as classics of 20thcentury American theater.

Frequently, Simon’s plays centered on white, middle-class Americans – mostly New Yorkers and mainly Jews - but the characters were universally relatable. He considered himself “an investigator” of the quotidian. “I don’t write social and political plays, because I’ve always thought the family was the microcosm of what goes on in the world,” Simon told the Paris Review in 1992. “I write about the small wars that eventually become the big wars.”

His output included dozens of plays, the scripts for five hit musicals, more than 20 screenplays and two volumes of memoirs. Many of his earliest shows were directed by Mike Nichols, who once said that much of Neil Simon attends the afterparty for “The Odd Couple” in New York on October 27, 2005.

Simon’s work will endure because of its “recognizability” – mining laughs from situations familiar to a vast middle-class public.

“You’d hear an ‘aah’ from the audience, a sound of ‘My God, that’s me,’” Nichols, the director of films including “The Graduate,” once told the New Yorker. “‘That’s me, that’s you, that’s Uncle Joe, that’s Pop.’ “

In the late 1960s and again in the mid-1980s Simon had four shows on Broadway simultaneously, the only times since Avery Hopwood in the 1920s that a playwright had achieved such a feat. His mind was a ceaselessly creative engine, turning out original movie scripts and screen adaptations of his own plays at a fantastic clip. “And I work at the post office during Christmas,” he quipped.

Because of his works’ commercial power, Simon’s stage and film projects often attracted big names, including Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Nathan Lane and Maggie Smith. He helped make a star of Matthew Broderick with “Brighton Beach Memoirs” (1983), which ran for three years on Broadway.