Neil Simon Adds Drama to ‘Laughter’

Neil Simon is the most prolific contemporary American playwright. Over the past 40 years, he’s penned countless comedy hits such as “The Odd Couple,” “Barefoot in the Park,” “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and the current Broadway farce, “The Dinner Party.” He’s won three Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize.

Yet for all of his success on Broadway, Simon considers one of the best times--if not the best time--of his life was when he was a writer on the classic Sid Caesar comedy-variety series, “Your Show of Shows” and “Caesar’s Hour.”

And Simon wasn’t the only comic genius working on those groundbreaking ‘50s NBC series. The writers’ room was also inhabited by Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Simon’s brother, Danny, Mel Tolkin and Joseph Stein.

“We didn’t know we were going to turn out to be very successful,” confesses Simon. “It was a breeding place for the best talent in America.”

Producer Max Leibman first paired Caesar and comedic actress Imogene Coca for the short-lived 1949 series, “Admiral Broadway Revue.” The following year, Caesar and Coca returned with “Your Show of Shows,” a 90-minute, live musical-comedy series that was broadcast 39 weeks a year from New York. With regulars Carl Reiner and Howard Morris, the groundbreaking series presented satires of current films, spoofs of foreign films, as well as such memorable characters as Caesar’s double-talking foreigner and roving reporter.

When Caesar and Coca went their separate ways in 1954, NBC gave the comic an hour variety series, “Caesar’s Hour.” Reiner and Morris joined Caesar in the new series and Nanette Fabray became his new comic foil.

Eight years ago, Simon wrote “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” his Broadway comedy about his experience writing on “Caesar’s Hour.” And now he’s adapted “Laughter” for Showtime, where the show can be seen tonight.

Nathan Lane, who starred in the Broadway production, reprises his role as Max Prince, Simon’s fictionalized version of Caesar. Prince is a brilliant, demanding comic adored by his writers. Prince’s group of yuksters, though, are worried about his increasing reliance on alcohol and pills to help him through the grind of doing a live weekly show. Prince also is embroiled in increasingly hostile bouts with the network brass who are worried that the sophisticated comedy show is being beaten in the ratings by ABC’s homey “The Lawrence Welk Show.”

The play was set in the writers’ room, but for the film, Simon has opened up the action considerably. He’s fleshed out Prince to show his home life as well as his relationship with his older, shy brother Harry (Richard Portnow). In fact, Simon has turned “Laughter” from a comedy into a drama with comedic overtones.

Lane believes the film version is better than the play. “Neil did a wonderful job of adapting it,” says the actor, currently in Brooks’ smash Broadway musical version of “The Producers.”

“The play itself was more for entertainment,” says Lane. “It was his valentine [to Caesar and the writers]. The criticism of the play was that it didn’t go further and deeper. He tried to do that here. You get to see his home life and the drinking and the drugging.”

Simon acknowledges that perhaps back in 1993 he wasn’t ready to write a more dramatic piece. “I thought it was such fun writing in that writers’ room,” he says. “People would ask me what it was like in the writers’ room. I wanted to do a portrayal of what it was like.”

Director Richard Benjamin, who also made 1982’s “My Favorite Year,” another fictionalized look at Caesar, says “Laughter” offers a real examination of “what a toll [TV] takes on somebody with this genius ability. I always think of comedians anyway as some kind of heroes to go out there and get laughs. It’s a life-and-death situation. . . . When it was ‘Your Show of Shows,’ it was an hour and a half [live each week]. And the sketches are not short things. It is amazing.”

When Caesar first went on the air, Simon says, the humor was distinctly urban. “The only places where there were TV sets were New York and Boston, maybe Philadelphia. I don’t know about Los Angeles, maybe a few major cities.”

But when TV sets began to be distributed around the country, Caesar and company suffered. “When we were being shown in Kentucky, New Orleans and wherever else, they didn’t get the satires we were doing,” says Simon.

So the writers were told to water down the show and make it accessible to the broader audience. “Whenever you do that, you dilute it,” Simon says. “So gradually we became not less quality, but less audience.”

And just as in the movie, “Caesar’s Hour” finally was canceled in 1957 because it couldn’t compete with Welk’s champagne music.

Ironically, “Laughter on the 23rd Floor” will be airing opposite repeats of “The Lawrence Welk Show” on KOCE-TV.

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“Laughter on the 23rd Floor” can be seen tonight at 8 on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under 14).