Neil Simon Thinks Comedy Is Best Reflection of Reality

Playwright Neil Simon says tickling the funny bone is a better way to reflect reality than drama.

“I don’t think about what I’m trying to reflect of the human condition,” said Simon, who will be honored on PBS’s “American Masters” next Monday.

“I’ve found that comedy is the best way for me to reflect my own feelings. I think comedy can be more realistic than drama. But I do like the mixture of comedy and drama in a play.”

Simon, the author of 25 plays, is perhaps the world’s most successful playwright. Only one play, “Actors and Actresses,” was scrubbed in tryouts before it reached Broadway. Many of them have been made into motion pictures, in addition to the stories he has written directly for the screen.

“Neil Simon: Not Just for Laughs” examines his style of humor and offers a portrait of Simon through interviews with actors, directors and producers and a conversation with the playwright.

The program includes excerpts from the film versions of such plays as “Barefoot in the Park,” “The Odd Couple,” “Plaza Suite,” “Chapter Two” and “The Sunshine Boys.”

The cameras followed Simon for five or six months: to a tribute to the playwright at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel; to a comedy class he taught with his brother, writer Danny Simon; and to theaters where he put together his latest play, “Rumors.”

Many of his plays are inspired by aspects of his own life. Three plays, “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Broadway Bound,” tell of an aspiring young playwright named Eugene Jerome.

“Some plays deal with myself, some deal with friends of mine and some are just picked out of the air,” he said. “My plays are never autobiographical; otherwise, I would call the characters Neil Simon. They’re fictionalized experiences you remember.

“Eugene Jerome is essentially Neil Simon. Essentially, yes. There is a catharsis in this. You don’t go into it without purpose. I think the most cathartic one was ‘Broadway Bound.’ It dealt with my relationship with my family in a more traumatic period. ‘Brighton Beach Memoirs’ was a sort of idealized version of that family life.”

His current play on Broadway, “Rumors,” is a farce and fast-paced comedy he wrote as a change of pace. Next up is “Jake’s Women,” which he said is a mixture of comedy and drama. He also has written two movies for Disney, “The Marrying Man” and “Heaven on Earth.”

Simon is a graduate of Sid Caesar’s 1950s television show, “Your Show of Shows,” a phenomenal breeding ground for comedy that also produced such writers as Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Afterward, Simon also wrote for “Caesar’s Hour.”

“I was so lucky to be able to work at that time with the best performers and the best comedy writers,” he said. “That’s what you go to college for, and I was getting paid for it.”

Despite his success, or perhaps because of it, Simon has rarely been taken seriously by the critics. “I think, by and large, I’ve had my fair shake from the critics,” he said. “You have to view it as a total. I think the very fact that they’re doing a program about me indicates somebody is taking me seriously. When I say the critics are fair with me that includes the negative reviews because sometimes I agree with them.”

Simon moved to Los Angeles in 1975, and since that time all of his plays except “Broadway Bound” have opened on the West Coast before going to New York. He said West Coast audiences are more polite and generally arrive on time.

“I have an apartment in New York and do move back and forth,” he said, “but you reach a point in your life when you don’t need the energy of New York to write. You take it with you in your head. I’ve never lost that sense of desire to write. If anything, out here it’s increased.”

ODD SINGLE: Walter Matthau will star as a lawyer who defends a German prisoner-of-war accused of murder in a small U.S. town in the CBS World War II era movie “Incident at Lincoln Bluff.” The movie, Matthau’s first for television, will be telecast in February, 1990. Matthau has starred in more than 50 feature films and won an Oscar as best supporting actor in 1966 for “The Fortune Cookie.”