USA TODAY International Edition
Neil Simon’s humor was for everyone
Neil Simon, the legendary comedic playwright whose beloved hits include “The Odd Couple,” “Barefoot in the Park” and “Sweet Charity,” has died. He was 91.
The writer died early Sunday of complications from pneumonia at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, where he was surrounded by his family, said his longtime friend Bill Evans, director of media relations for the Shubert Organization.
Neil Simon’s place in the dramatic canon never rivaled that of Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams or August Wilson, to name a few 20th-century icons who died before him. But Simon proved more consistently popular with mass audiences by channeling the neuroses of everyday people into one clever, accessible comedy after the next.
Simon’s Broadway productions included plays such as “The Sunshine Boys” and musicals “They’re Playing Our Song” and “Promises, Promises.”
In the 1980s, Simon enjoyed a career revival, and increased critical acclaim, with his semi-autobiographical “Eugene trilogy,” consisting of three plays focusing on a young man who grew up in New York City: “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Broadway Bound.” “Lost in Yonkers,” another coming-of-age tale, earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1991.
As word spread of his death, the theater world collectively mourned. Josh Gad called Simon “one of the primary influences on my life and career.” Harvey Fierstein hailed him as a wordsmith who “could write a joke that would make you laugh, define the character, the situation, and even the world’s problems.”
Many of Simon’s works were adapted for the screen as feature films (he was a four-time Oscar nominee) and TV movies. He also wrote original screenplays, including “The Goodbye Girl,” which earned him a Golden Globe Award in 1978. He collected the first of four Tony Awards in 1965, for “Odd Couple,” which also became a hit TV series.
Television had been Simon’s launching pad. In the 1950s, he worked for “The Phil Silvers Show” and for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” where his colleagues included Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Woody Allen, three other Jewish, New York-bred writers who would weave their sensibilities indelibly into the wider fabric of American humor.
His success in theater and film found Simon collaborating with, and nurturing, some of the greatest comedic actors of the past centur, from Art Carney and Walter Matthau to Jack Lemmon to Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane.
As for the notion that Simon was a relative lightweight, the writer had an estimable defender in critic and playwright Walter Kerr, who observed that “Americans have always tended to underrate writers who make them laugh” and that Simon’s “best comedies contain not only a host of funny lines but numerous memorable characters and an incisively dramatized set of beliefs that are not without merit. Simon is, in fact, one of the finest writers of comedy in American literary history.”