With eight years difference in their ages, Neil idolized his older brother, who had dropped out of high school to become a comedy writer. Danny Simon, about whom Woody Allen would later say, "Everything I know about comedy I learned from Danny Simon,"
was a comic genius. But so, as it all turned out, was his younger brother, Neil, whom Danny nicknamed Doc, because of Neil's childhood infatuation with a toy medical set. By the time Doc, as he was always called, was sixteen, the two brothers had begun working together.
During World War II, both Simon brothers joined the armed forces, and when they returned to New York City, they soon found work writing for television, which was in its infancy. During the early 1950s, in what would come to be known as the Golden Age of Television, Danny and Doc Simon were staff writers for such classic programs as Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows and Phil Silvers's The Sergeant Bilko Show. However, although the Simon brothers almost exclusively wrote for small screen, one of their sketches did make it to Broadway in the 1956 revue New Faces, starring Maggie Smith.
This is a free page. This page contains 167 words. This
article contains 1,563 words (approx. 5 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Simon, Neil (1927—) Access Pass.
