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"When I was a kid," playwright Neil Simon tells Tom Prideaux of Life, "I climbed up on a stone ledge to watch an outdoor movie of Charlie Chaplin. I laughed so hard I fell off, cut my head open and was taken to the doctor, bleeding and laughing.... My idea of the ultimate achievement in a comedy is to make a whole audience fall onto the floor, writhing and laughing so hard that some of them pass out." For some thirty years Simon's comedies have dominated the Broadway stage and have been adapted as popular Hollywood films as well. As David Richards explains in the Washington Post, Simon's comedies have run "forever on Broadway and made him pots of money, after which they were turned into movies that made him pots more." Such plays as Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, The Sunshine Boys, and the autobiographical trilogy of Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound, have ensured Simon a position as "one of America's most popular and prolific playwrights" and "the most formidable comedy writer in American theatre," as Sheila Ennis Geitner reports in Dictionary of Literary Biography.
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