TV REVIEW : PBS Makes a Case for Neil Simon, Seriously

Neil Simon is taking questions from the audience. He is asked how standup comedy evolved. Gee, I wouldn’t have a clue, he says. Probably it’s rooted in “the absence of chairs.”

Now, that’s funny. And so, happily, is most of Sunday’s “American Masters” profile of Simon, despite its rather lugubrious title--”Neil Simon: Not Just For Laughs” (KCET Channel 28 at 8 p.m.).

One of its arguments is that Simon has been so good at getting us to laugh at his lines over the last 28 years (there have been 24 plays and 17 movies since “Come Blow Your Horn”) that we haven’t given him enough credit for being a sensitive observer of the human predicament.

“A good writer but certainly no Arthur Miller” is Simon’s own perception of how he’s viewed by the critics, and this judgment seems to grate a little.

Simon’s friend and producer, Emanuel Azenberg, also is mildly ticked. “If (Simon’s work) is only about money, if it’s all so ‘unprofound,’ how come in a country of 250 million people, not one person has come even close?”

The last sentence doesn’t quite achieve a meaning, but we get the gist--we ought to be grateful to the guy. As a matter of fact, we are, for reasons that are well-documented here.

For instance, we are given the scene in the movie version of “The Odd Couple” where Felix (Jack Lemmon) tries to clear his ears. This scene will not change anybody’s life, but it promotes the kind of laughter that improves everybody’s health, and Arthur Miller wouldn’t have thought of it in a million years.

Why does every writer want to be somebody else? Who wants Neil Simon to be a sage? When Simon tries to play the family counselor--”The Gingerbread Lady,” “I Ought to Be in Pictures”--his plays lose their verve.

What distinguished him as far back as “Barefoot in the Park” (also excerpted) was that he was intelligent and that he tied the laugh to the character. His current show, “Rumors,” aside, he has generally kept to that practice. He has given audiences more pleasure than any other playwright of his day, and they have given him more money than any playwright of any day.

Not a bad career. Azenberg is dead-on when he praises Simon’s ability to maintain . Like Noel Coward, this is a writer who piles up pages, no matter how turbulent his inner weather. But Simon reminds us that the plays come out of that weather. Comedy is what’s funny later.

We watch Simon revisit important places in his youth, places that have turned up in his plays: the old family apartment, the summer place near Brighton Beach, the walk-up that his late wife, Joan, rented for them when they were first married.

A Simonesque scene occurs when he meets a woman on the corner who remembers him vividly as a kid. “We can’t call you Peewee Simon any more!” she says gaily. “No,” the playwright says with a slight wince. Not his favorite nickname.

By the time he and his big brother Danny were writing for “Your Show of Shows,” he was “Doc” Simon. Carl Reiner recalls how he would run interference for him at those tumultuous story meetings, and Simon recalls it as the best comedy school in the world--the funniest minds of his generation (Reiner, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Sid Caesar himself) all in the same room. What if we dunk Imogene in the tank?

A sketch might take three hours to write. After he and Danny decided to “split up and become cousins” (Danny tells us about that), he tried an actual play. “Come Blow Your Horn” took three years to write, and at that rate he didn’t think he’d produce many more.

But after a decade or so, he got the knack. Simon now feels in general command of the playwright’s craft, sensing, for example, when a good-enough scene really isn’t good enough.

The famous moment in “Broadway Bound” where the mother dances with the son (here we get a clip from the stage play, with Linda Lavin and Jonathan Silverman) was a last-minute replacement for another scene. But it was latent in the story all along, was perhaps the reason the story wanted to get written. A writer learns to trust his process.

Life isn’t so reliable, and Simon doesn’t feel that he has transplanted very well to California, although New York seems even more impossible. He feels as if he’s lived “seven or eight lives,” isn’t sure what’s coming next for him, takes it for granted that there will be a play in it.

The program, produced by Manya Starr and directed by Amram Nowak, ends with a clip from the film of “Brighton Beach Memoirs” where young Eugene (Silverman again) muffs a fly ball to left field. “Yeah,” he tells himself. “I’ll definitely be a writer.”

Choice stuff. But no choicer than the scene when Eugene tiptoes away from the dining room table and says: “The silence around the table was so thick you could cut it with a knife--which was more than could be said for the liver.”

Next to this, who needs profound?