Neil Simon is a critical embarrassment. It is bad enough that he is commercially the most successful dramatic writer of the past decade, but to make matters worse no one is quite sure why his comedies are such triumphs. It is very easy to point out the qualities that Simon's writing lacks; indeed, when placed up against any conventional checklist of "characteristics of great comedy," his plays are likely to fail on every count. Every count but one, that is; the fact is indisputable that a Neil Simon comedy makes the audiences laugh, and this laughter is louder, longer and more constant than that produced by any other modern dramatist. I propose to offer a partial explanation for Simon's success: that the secret of his special comic talent is a matter of pure technique: that it is not the content of his plays, but the manner in which that content is presented that generates most of the laughter; and that the specific technique in question is so simple and automatic as to turn his plays into virtual laugh machines, producng a product—laughter—with foolproof ease and accuracy.
To double back for a moment to what Simon's plays do not do, however—it is universally agreed that they offer no specific insights into the human condition. And one might secretly be thankful for that, for this is certainly not where Simon's talent lies. On the rare occasions that he attempts some more-than-surface characterization or philosophising, the result is either bathetic (as in Barney Cashman's long autobiographical speech in Act I of Last of the Red Hot Lovers or almost any moment in The Gingerbread Lady) or just cliched, as in the moment of great discovery in "Visitor from Forest Hills," the final playlet of Plaza Suite:
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