Not much, just great for 40 years

 Even with everything else going on, the death of Neil Simon should not go unremarked. Two hundred years from now,  there will be revivals of Antigone, Hamlet and The Odd Couple. I am not so sure about anything else.
 Cast your mind back to 1963 when someone told me I absolutely had to see Barefoot in the Park because it was the story of our lives. Simon had already written Come Blow Your Horn and Little Me. Five years later he wrote Plaza Suite, which was three one-acters set in the Plaza Hotel. Somehow that migrated to television, and Mimsey locking herself in the bathroom and not coming out  on her wedding day is something I can't think about without laughing.
 I was going to quote a line from that act. But there aren't any funny lines in it. I also thought about  quoting the funniest line I think Simon ever wrote -- it has to do with the floor an apartment is on -- but it would take two paragraphs to explain why it is funny, and explaining it would kill it.


 So when I started getting paid for reviewing theater about the time The Sunshine Boys was made into a movie (1975) I couldn't understand the knock on Simon -- that he could only write gags. I couldn't find his gags to quote them.
 The people and situations are what make the comedy. Simon's people are ordinary, and their situations are not that extraordinary. (Stephen Sondheim matched Mimsyey's situation musically with "I'm Not Getting Married.") But ordinary or not,  that is what we laugh at when we laugh at a Simon play.
 If it were easy, someone else would have done it.
 By 1975, he had been writing Broadway Plays for a decade and a half, and all of them were hits, and they were rolling out. He didn't need a year in Tuscany to recover from a hit. Of course, he was no Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams, "they" said.  Miller was still alive and not writing much, and Williams was still writing, but the critics demanded another Streetcar, and nobody could give them that.  (I'd like to see at least two of his late plays that never got past Off-Broadway).
 The Big Boys of criticdom were waiting for Edward Albee to fulfill his promise. David Mamet came along and wrote a magnificent play (American Buffalo) and some very good ones. Other playwrights came, gained some prominence, and moved to Hollywood, where the money is better and the respect is almost non-existent.
 And all through that, Simon was turning out hits, except for Fools in 1971, which was never as bad as they said. Then he turned to autobiography -- Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound (three hits in four years), and Simon finally got the respect the previous 20 years of making people on Broadway rich hadn't gotten him.
 All this time, he had also been producing original plots for movies like The Out-of-Towners and The Cheap Detective.
 Finally, in  1991, 30 years after he began, the Pulitzer Prize judges noticed, and gave him a reward for Lost in Yonkers, another memory play. Sheesh. And he went on to write eight more funny plays without gags after that.
 And now he is dead at 91. And in years to come scholars wondering about urban America from the '60s to the '00s will stumble upon his plays and say, "Oh, that's how it was." And 200 years from now an impresario, looking for a sure sell-out, will open the season with The Odd Couple, the pasta  will once again hit the wall, and Simon will leave them laughing.