Legend has it that on his deathbed the actor Edmund Gwenn answered director John Ford’s “What is dying like?” with a reflective, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

By any measure—quantity, quality, popular success, renown—Neil Simon is the preeminent purveyor of comedy in the last half of the twentieth century. Like the work of most writers of comedy, from Aristophanes to Woody Allen, Simon’s humor is written to be spoken. And heard. For Simon the art of humor is both communal (each member of the audience in league with all the other members of the audience) and collegial (playwright and performers in league with the audience—a relationship Simon will describe as a “shared secret”). Fielding, Twain, and Thurber can be savored in one’s lap, but verbal, visual humor, like misery, loves company. Simon is not only skillful at his craft but prolific as well. He is the author of more than twenty plays, including Come Blow Your Horn, Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, the Brighton Beach trilogy, Prisoner of Second Avenue, Plaza Suite, and Lost in Yonkers.

These pages are the winnowing of sixteen hours of taped conversation in Simon’s office on the second floor of a Spanish colonial apartment building in the Beverly Hills flats—several miles, a thousand vertical feet, and a dozen social strata below the Bel Air hilltop home Simon shares with his wife Diane and their daughter Bryn.

The writer’s no-nonsense work space, impersonal in its laid-back Southern Californian setting, is conspicuously empty (no secretary, no phone calls, no distractions) but intensely personal in the memorabilia that have, as Simon explains, “sort of gravitated” there over the years.

Halfway through the tour of the apartment Simon stopped abruptly and remarked, in apparent surprise, on how many of the room’s furnishings date from the house on Manhattan’s East Sixty-second Street where he lived with his first wife Joan: chairs, tables, photographs, paintings—some painted by Joan—and a framed letter from her, written in cryptic, Joycean prose and signed, “Klarn.” The baseball paraphernalia on display reflects another side of Simon’s life. His substantial collection of antique caps and autographed balls, with a recent emphasis on Bobby Bonilla, would knock the kneesocks off the playwright’s baseball-mad alter ego, Eugene Jerome.

There are the usual theatrical souvenirs and a few unusual ones: a telegram from the president of Columbia University informing Simon of his Pulitzer Prize for Lost in Yonkers, a Neil Simon Time magazine cover, a poster from the Moscow production of Biloxi Blues, signed by the cast, “Dear Neil Simon, We love you and your plays. We had worked on this performance with enjoy.”

“Doc” Simon, so called from his childhood habit of mimicking the family doctor, is tall and fit, despite the chronic back problems that have curtailed his tennis playing in recent years. We sat at a massive, polished tree-stump coffee table covered with the tools of his trade: pens neatly stacked (by the cleaning woman, he hastened to say), scripts—finished and unfinished—books, and the long pads on which he writes. We laughed frequently as we discussed his plays, opinions, and past. Even when the talk turned as serious as some of his recent scripts, the face that peered over the tree stump like a Bronx leprechaun bore two indelible Simon trademarks: the eyes of an insatiably curious and slightly guarded child, shielded by horn-rimmed glasses, and a faint, constant, enigmatic smile. Take a look at the accompanying photograph. What is this man smiling at? Perhaps the shared secret.

INTERVIEWER

Lillian Hellman once said she always began work on a play with something very small—a scene or even two vague lines of dialogue whose meaning was utterly unknown to her. What starts you, what makes you think there’s a play there?

NEIL SIMON

As many plays as I’ve written—twenty-seven, twenty-eight—I can’t recollect a moment when I’ve said, This would make a good play. I never sit down and write bits and pieces of dialogue. What I might do is make a few notes on who’s in the play, the characters I want, where it takes place, and the general idea of it. I don’t make any outlines at all. I just like to plunge in. I’ll start right from page one because I want to hear how the people speak. Are they interesting enough for me? Have I captured them? It goes piece by piece, brick by brick. I don’t know that I have a play until I’ve reached thirty, thirty-five pages.

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever started thematically?

SIMON

I think about thematic plays but I don’t believe I write them. Nothing really takes shape until I become specific about the character and the dilemma he’s in. Dilemma is the key word. It is always a dilemma, not a situation. To tell the truth, I really don’t know what the theme of the play is until I’ve written it and the critics tell me.

INTERVIEWER

Every playwright, every director, every actor, speaks about conflict. We’re all supposed to be in the conflict business. When you speak of dilemma, are you talking about conflict?

SIMON

Yes. In Broadway Bound I wanted to show the anatomy of writing comedy—with the older brother teaching Eugene, which was the case with my brother Danny and me. Stan keeps asking Eugene for the essential ingredient in comedy and when Eugene can’t answer, Stan says, “Conflict!” When he asks for the other key ingredient, and Eugene can only come up with, “More conflict?” Stan says, “The key word is wants. In every comedy, even drama, somebody has to want something and want it bad. When somebody tries to stop him—that’s conflict.” By the time you know the conflicts, the play is already written in your mind. All you have to do is put the words down. You don’t have to outline the play, it outlines itself. You go by sequential activity. One thing follows the other. But it all starts with that first seed, conflict. As Stan says, it’s got to be a very, very strong conflict, not one that allows the characters to say, Forget about this! I’m walking out. They’ve got to stay there and fight it out to the end.

INTERVIEWER

You said that it isn’t until you get to page thirty-five that you know whether or not you’ve got a play. Are there times when you get to page thirty-five and decide the conflict isn’t strong enough and the play disappears to languish forever in a drawer?

SIMON

I’ve got infinitely more plays in the drawer than have seen the lights of the stage. Most of them never come out of the drawer, but occasionally one will and it amazes me how long it has taken to germinate and blossom. The best example would be Brighton Beach Memoirs. I wrote the first thirty-five pages of the play and gave it to my children, Nancy and Ellen, and Marsha, my wife at the time. They read it and said, This is incredible. You’ve got to go on with it. I showed it to my producer, Manny Azenberg and to Gordon Davidson, and they said, This is going to be a great play. I knew the play was a turn in style for me, probing more deeply into myself, but maybe the pressure of the words great play scared me, so I put it away. Periodically, I would take it out and read it and I wouldn’t know how to do it. After nine years I took it out one day, read the thirty-five pages, picked up my pen and the pad I write on and finished the play in six weeks. I have the feeling that in the back of your mind there’s a little writer who writes while you’re doing other things, because I had no trouble at that point. Obviously, what had happened in the ensuing years in my life made clear to me what it should be about. Somewhere in the back of my head I grew up, I matured. I was ready to write that play. Sometimes it helps to have some encouragement. Once I was having dinner with Mike Nichols and he asked, What are you doing? I said, I’m working on a play about two ex-vaudevillians who haven’t worked together or seen each other in eleven years and they get together to do an Ed Sullivan Show. He said, That sounds wonderful. Go back and finish it. So I did. It was as though a critic had already seen the play and said, I love it. But there are many, many plays that get to a certain point and no further. For years I’ve been trying to write the play of what happened to me and the seven writers who wrote Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. But I’ve never got past page twenty-two because there are seven conflicts rather than one main conflict. I’ve been writing more subtext and more subplot lately—but in this situation everybody was funny. I didn’t have somebody to be serious, to anchor it. I always have to find the anchor. I have to find the Greek chorus in the play, the character who either literally talks to the audience or talks to the audience in a sense. For example, Oscar in The Odd Couple is the Greek chorus. He watches, he perceives how Felix behaves, and he comments on it. Felix then comments back on what Oscar is, but Oscar is the one who is telling us what the play is about. More recently, in the Brighton Beach trilogy, I’ve been literally talking to the audience, through the character of Eugene, because it is the only way I can express the writer’s viewpoint. The writer has inner thoughts and they are not always articulated on the stage—and I want the audience to be able to get inside his head. It’s what I did in Jake’s Women. In the first try out in San Diego the audience didn’t know enough about Jake because all he did was react to the women in his life, who were badgering him, trying to get him to open up. We didn’t know who Jake was. So I introduced the device of him talking to the audience. Then he became the fullest, richest character in the play, because the audience knew things I never thought I would reveal about Jake—and possibly about myself.

INTERVIEWER

Will you return to the Show of Shows play?

SIMON

I do very often think about doing it. What was unique about that experience was that almost every one of the writers has gone on to do really major things—Mel Brooks’s whole career . . . Larry Gelbart . . . Woody Allen . . . Joe Stein who wrote Fiddler on the Roof . . . Michael Stewart who wrote Hello, Dolly . . . it was a group of people only Sid Caesar knew how to put together. Maybe it was trial and error because the ones who didn’t work fell out, but once we worked together it was the most excruciatingly hilarious time in my life. It was also one of the most painful because you were fighting for recognition and there was no recognition. It was very difficult for me because I was quiet and shy, so I sat next to Carl Reiner and whispered my jokes to him. He was my spokesman, he’d jump up and say, He’s got it! He’s got it! Then Carl would say the line and I would hear it and I’d laugh because I thought it was funny. But when I watched the show on a Saturday night with my wife, Joan, she’d say, That was your line, wasn’t it? and I’d say, I don’t remember. What I do remember is the screaming and fighting—a cocktail party without the cocktails, everyone yelling lines in and out, people getting very angry at others who were slacking off. Mel Brooks was the main culprit. We all came in to work at ten o’clock in the morning, but he showed up at one o’clock. We’d say, That’s it. We’re sick and tired of this. Either Mel comes in at ten o’clock or we go to Sid and do something about it. At about ten to one, Mel would come in with a straw hat, fling it across the room, and say, Lindy made it!—and everyone would fall down hysterical. He didn’t need the eight hours we put in. He needed four hours. He is, maybe, the most uniquely funny man I’ve ever met. That inspired me. I wanted to be around those people. I’ve fooled around with this idea for a play. I even found a title for it, “Laughter on the Twenty-third Floor,” because I think the office was on the twenty-third floor. From that building we looked down on Bendel’s and Bergdorf Goodman and Fifth Avenue, watching all the pretty girls go by through binoculars. Sometimes we’d set fire to the desk with lighter fluid. We should have been arrested, all of us.

INTERVIEWER

If you ever get past page twenty-two, how would you deal with Mel and Woody and the others? Would they appear as themselves?

SIMON

No, no, no! They’d all be fictitious. It would be like the Brighton Beach trilogy, which is semiautobiographical.

INTERVIEWER

It feels totally autobiographical. I assumed it was.

SIMON

Everyone does. But I’ve told interviewers that if I meant it to be autobiographical I would have called the character Neil Simon. He’s not Neil. He’s Eugene Jerome. That gives you greater latitude for fiction. It’s like doing abstract painting. You see your own truth in it but the abstraction is the art.

INTERVIEWER

When did you realize there was a sequel to Brighton Beach Memoirs?

SIMON

It got a middling review from Frank Rich of The New York Times, but he said at the end of it, “One hopes that there is a chapter two to Brighton Beach.” I thought, he’s asking for a sequel to a play that he doesn’t seem to like!

INTERVIEWER

Are you saying Frank Rich persuaded you to write Biloxi Blues?

SIMON

No, but I listened to him saying, I’m interested enough to want to know more about this family. Then, Steven Spielberg, who had gone to see Brighton Beach, got word to me, suggesting the next play should be about my days in the army. I was already thinking about that and I started to write Biloxi Blues, which became a play about Eugene’s rites of passage. I discovered something very important in the writing of Biloxi Blues. Eugene, who keeps a diary, writes in it his belief that Epstein is homosexual. When the other boys in the barracks read the diary and assume it’s true, Eugene feels terrible guilt. He’s realized the responsibility of putting something down on paper, because people tend to believe everything they read.

INTERVIEWER

The Counterfeiters ends with the diary André Gide kept while he was writing the book. In it he says he knows he’s writing well when the dialectic of the scene takes over and the characters seize the scene from him and he’s become not a writer but a reader. Do you sometimes find that your characters have taken the play away from you and are off in their own direction?

SIMON

I’ve always felt like a middleman, like the typist. Somebody somewhere else is saying, This is what they say now. This is what they say next. Very often it is the characters themselves, once they become clearly defined. When I was working on my first play, Come Blow Your Horn, I was told by fellow writers that you must outline your play, you must know where you’re going. I wrote a complete, detailed outline from page one to the end of the play. In the writing of the play, I didn’t get past page fifteen when the characters started to move away from the outline. I tried to pull them back in, saying, Get back in there. This is where you belong. I’ve already diagrammed your life. They said, No, no, no. This is where I want to go. So, I started following them. In the second play, Barefoot in the Park, I outlined the first two acts. I said, I’ll leave the third act a free-for-all, so I can go where I want. I never got through that outline either. In The Odd Couple, I outlined the first act. After a while I got tired of doing even that. I said, I want to be as surprised as anyone else. I had also read a book on playwriting by John van Druten, in which he said, Don’t outline your play, because then the rest of it will just be work. It should be joy. You should be discovering things the way the audience discovers them. So, I stopped doing it.

INTERVIEWER

Gide writes about being surprised by the material coming up on the typewriter. He finds himself laughing, shocked, sometimes dismayed . . .

SIMON

Sometimes I start laughing—and I’ve had moments in this office when I’ve burst into tears. Not that I thought the audience might do that. The moment had triggered a memory or a feeling that was deeply hidden. That’s catharsis. It’s one of the main reasons I write the plays. It’s like analysis without going to the analyst. The play becomes your analysis. The writing of the play is the most enjoyable part of it. It’s also the most frightening part because you walk into a forest without a knife, without a compass. But if your instincts are good, if you have a sense of geography, you find that you’re clearing a path and getting to the right place. If the miracle happens, you come out at the very place you wanted to. But very often you have to go back to the beginning of the forest and start walking through it again, saying, I went that way. It was a dead end. You cross out, cross over. You meet new friends along the way, people you never thought you’d meet. It takes you into a world you hadn’t planned on going to when you started the play. The play may have started out to be a comedy, and suddenly you get into a place of such depth that it surprises you. As one critic aptly said, I wrote Brighton Beach Memoirs about the family I wished I’d had instead of the family I did have. It’s closer to Ah, Wilderness than my reality.

INTERVIEWER

When did you realize that Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues were part of a trilogy?

SIMON

I thought it seemed odd to leave the Eugene saga finished after two plays. Three is a trilogy—I don’t even know what two plays are called. So, I decided to write the third one, and the idea came immediately. It was back to the war theme again, only these were domestic wars. The boys were having guilts and doubts about leaving home for a career writing comedy. Against this played the war between the parents. I also brought in the character of the socialist grandfather who was constantly telling the boys, You can’t just write jokes and make people laugh. Against this came Blanche from the first play, Brighton Beach, trying to get the grandfather to move to Florida to take care of his aging, ill wife. To me, setting people in conflict with each other is like what those Chinese jugglers do, spinning one plate, then another, then another. I wanted to keep as many plates spinning as I could.

INTERVIEWER

What exactly do you mean when you call the Brighton Beach trilogy semiautobiographical?

SIMON

It means the play may be based on incidents that happened in my life—but they’re not written the way they happened. Broadway Bound comes closest to being really autobiographical. I didn’t pull any punches with that one. My mother and father were gone when I wrote it, so I did tell about the fights and what it was like for me as a kid hearing them. I didn’t realize until someone said after the first reading that the play was really a love letter to my mother! She suffered the most in all of it. She was the one that was left alone. Her waxing that table didn’t exist in life but it exists symbolically for me. It’s the abstraction I was talking about.

INTERVIEWER

Speaking of abstraction, there’s something mystifying to audiences—and other writers—about what the great comedy writers do. From outside, it seems to be as different from what most writers are able to do as baseball is from ballet. I’m not going to ask anything quite as fatuous as “what is humor?” but I am asking—is it genetic, is it a mind-set, a quirk? And, most important, can it be learned—or, for that matter, taught?

SIMON

The answer is complex. First of all, there are various styles and attitudes towards comedy. When I worked on Your Show of Shows, Larry Gelbart was the wittiest, cleverest man I’d ever met, Mel Brooks the most outrageous. I never knew what I was. I still don’t know. Maybe I had the best sense of construction of the group. I only know some aspects of my humor, one of which involves being completely literal. To give you an example, in Lost in Yonkers, Uncle Louie is trying to explain the heartless grandmother to Arty. “When she was twelve years old, her old man takes her to a political rally in Berlin. A horse goes down and crushes Ma’s foot. Nobody ever fixed it. It hurts every day of her life, but I never once seen her take even an aspirin.” Later, Arty says to his older brother, “I’m afraid of her, Jay. A horse fell on her when she was a kid, and she hasn’t taken an aspirin yet.” It’s an almost exact repetition of what Louie told him and this time it gets a huge laugh. That mystifies me. In Prisoner of Second Avenue you knew there were terrible things tormenting Peter Falk. He sat down on a sofa that had stacks of pillows, like every sofa in the world, and he took one pillow after the other and started throwing them angrily saying, “You pay eight hundred for a sofa and you can’t sit on it because you got ugly little pillows shoved up your back! There is no joke there. Yet, it was an enormous laugh—because the audience identified. That, more or less, is what is funny to me—saying something that’s instantly identifiable to everybody. People come up to you after the show and say, I’ve always thought that, but I never knew anyone else thought it. It’s a shared secret between you and the audience.

INTERVIEWER

 You’ve often said that you’ve never consciously written a joke in one of your plays.

SIMON

I try never to think of jokes as jokes. I confess that in the early days, when I came from television, plays like Come Blow Your Horn would have lines you could lift out that would be funny in themselves. That to me would be a “joke,” which I would try to remove. In The Odd Couple Oscar had a line about Felix, “He’s so panicky he wears his seatbelt at a drive-in movie.” That could be a Bob Hope joke. I left it in because I couldn’t find anything to replace it.

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever found that a producer, director, or actor objected to losing a huge laugh that you were determined to cut from the play?

SIMON

An actor, perhaps, yes. They’ll say, But that’s my big laugh. I say, But it hurts the scene. It’s very hard to convince them. Walter Matthau was after me constantly on The Odd Couple, complaining not about one of his lines, but one of Art Carney’s. He’d say, It’s not a good line. A few days later, I received a letter from a doctor in Wilmington. It said, Dear Mr. Simon, I loved your play but I find one line really objectionable. I wish you would take it out. So, I took the line out and said, Walter, I’ve complied with your wishes. I got a letter from a prominent doctor in Wilmington who didn’t like the line . . . He started to laugh and then I realized, You son of a bitch, you’re the doctor! And he was. Those quick lines, the one-liners attributed to me for so many years—I think they come purely out of character, rather than out of a joke. Walter Kerr once came to my aid by saying “to be or not to be” is a one-liner. If it’s a dramatic moment no one calls it a one-liner. If it gets a laugh, suddenly it’s a one-liner. I think one of the complaints of critics is that the people in my plays are funnier than they would be in life, but have you ever seen Medea? The characters are a lot more dramatic in that than they are in life.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve also said that when you began writing for the theater you decided to try to write comedy the way dramatists write plays—writing from the characters out, internally, psychologically . . .

SIMON

Yes. What I try to do is make dialogue come purely out of character, so that one character could never say the lines that belong to another character. If it’s funny, it’s because I’m telling a story about characters in whom I may find a rich vein of humor. When I started writing plays I was warned by people like Lillian Hellman, “You do not mix comedy with drama.” But my theory was, if it’s mixed in life, why can’t you do it in a play? The very first person I showed Come Blow Your Horn to was Herman Shumlin, the director of Hellman’s The Little Foxes. He said, I like the play, I like the people, but I don’t like the older brother. I said, What’s wrong with him? He said, Well, it’s a comedy. We have to like everybody. I said, In life do we have to like everybody? In the most painful scene in Lost in Yonkers, Bella, who is semiretarded, is trying to tell the family that the boy she wants to marry is also retarded. It’s a poignant situation and yet the information that slowly comes out—and the way the family is third-degreeing her—becomes hilarious because it’s mixed with someone else’s pain. I find that what is most poignant is often most funny.

INTERVIEWER

In the roll-call scene in Biloxi Blues you riff for several pages on one word, one syllable: Ho. It builds and builds in what I’ve heard you call a “run.”

SIMON

I learned from watching Chaplin films that what’s most funny isn’t a single moment of laughter but the moments that come on top of it and on top of those. I learned it from the Laurel and Hardy films too. One of the funniest things I ever saw Laurel and Hardy do was try to undress in the upper berth of a train—together. It took ten minutes, getting the arms in the wrong sleeves and their feet caught in the net, one terrible moment leading to another. I thought, there could be no greater satisfaction for me than to do that to an audience. Maybe Ho also came from sitting in the dark as a kid listening to Jack Benny’s running gags on the radio. In Barefoot in the Park, when the telephone man comes up five or six flights of stairs, he arrives completely out of breath. When Paul makes his entrance, he’s completely out of breath. When the mother makes her entrance, she’s completely out of breath. Some critics have written, You milk that out-of-breath joke too much. My answer is, You mean because it’s happened three times, when they come up the fourth time they shouldn’t be out of breath anymore? It’s not a joke, it’s the natural thing. Like Ho. Those boys are petrified on their first day in the army, confronted by this maniac sergeant.

INTERVIEWER

Do you pace the lines so the laughs don’t cover the dialogue or is that the director’s job? Do you try to set up a rhythm in the writing that will allow for the audience’s response?

SIMON

You don’t know where the laughs are until you get in front of an audience. Most of the biggest laughs I’ve ever had I never knew were big laughs. Mike Nichols used to say to me, Take out all the little laughs because they hurt the big ones. Sometimes the little laughs aren’t even meant to be laughs. I mean them to further the play, the plot, the character, the story. They’re written unwittingly . . . strange word to pick. I cut them and the laugh pops up somewhere else.

INTERVIEWER

When did you first realize you were funny?

SIMON

It started very early in my life—eight, nine, ten years old—being funny around the other kids. You single out one kid on your block or in the school who understands what you’re saying. He’s the only one who laughs. The other kids only laugh when someone tells them a joke—two guys got on a truck . . . I’ve never done that in my life. I don’t like telling jokes. I don’t like to hear someone say to me, Tell him that funny thing you said the other day. It’s repeating it. I have no more joy in it. Once it’s said, for me it’s over. The same is true once it’s written—I have no more interest in it. I’ve expelled whatever it is I needed to exorcise, whether it’s humorous or painful. Generally, painful. Maybe the humor is to cover the pain up or maybe it’s a way to share the experience with someone.

INTERVIEWER

Has psychoanalysis influenced your work?

SIMON

Yes. Generally I’ve gone into analysis when my life was in turmoil. But I found after a while I was going when it wasn’t in turmoil. I was going to get a college education in human behavior. I was talking not only about myself; I was trying to understand my wife, my brother, my children, my family, anybody—including the analyst. I can’t put everything in the plays down to pure chance. I want them to reveal what makes people tick. I tend to analyze almost everything. I don’t think it started because I went through analysis. I’m just naturally that curious. The good mechanic knows how to take a car apart; I love to take the human mind apart and see how it works. Behavior is absolutely the most interesting thing I can write about. You put that behavior in conflict and you’re in business.

INTERVIEWER

Would you describe your writing process? Since you don’t use an outline, do you ever know how a play will end?

SIMON

Sometimes I think I do—but it doesn’t mean that’s how the play will end. Very often you find that you’ve written past the end and you say, Wait a minute, it ended here. When I started to write Plaza Suite it was going to be a full three-act play. The first act was about a wife who rents the same suite she and her husband honeymooned in at the Plaza Hotel twenty-three years ago. In the course of the act the wife finds out that the husband is having an affair with his secretary and at the end of the act the husband walks out the door as champagne and hors d’oeuvres arrive. The waiter asks, Is he coming back? and the wife says, Funny you should ask that. I wrote that and said to myself, That’s the end of the play, I don’t want to know if he’s coming back. That’s what made me write three one-act plays for Plaza Suite. I don’t like to know where the play is going to end. I purposely won’t think of the ending because I’m afraid if I know, even subliminally, it’ll sneak into the script and the audience will know where the play is going. As a matter of fact, I never know where the play is going in the second act. When Broadway Bound was completed, I listened to the first reading and thought, There’s not a moment in this entire play where I see the mother happy. She’s a miserable woman. I want to know why she’s miserable. The answer was planted in the beginning of the play: the mother kept talking about how no one believed she once danced with George Raft. I thought, the boy should ask her to talk about George Raft and as she does, she’ll reveal everything in her past.

INTERVIEWER

The scene ends with the now-famous moment of the boy dancing with the mother the way Raft did—if he did.

SIMON

Yes. People have said, It’s so organic, you had to have known you were writing to that all the time. But I didn’t know it when I sat down to write the play. I had an interesting problem when I was writing Rumors. I started off with just a basic premise: I wanted to do an elegant farce. I wrote it right up to the last two pages of the play, the denouement in which everything has to be explained—and I didn’t know what it was! I said to myself, Today’s the day I have to write the explanation. All right, just think it out. I couldn’t think it out. So I said, Well then, go sentence by sentence. I couldn’t write it sentence by sentence. I said, Go word by word. The man sits down and tells the police the story. He starts off with, It was six o’clock. That much I could write. I kept going until everything made sense. That method takes either insanity or egocentricity—or a great deal of confidence. It’s like building a bridge over water without knowing if there’s land on the other side. But I do have confidence that when I get to the end of the play, I will have gotten so deeply into the characters and the situation I’ll find the resolution.

INTERVIEWER

So you never write backwards from a climactic event to the incidents and scenes at the beginning of the play that will take you to it?

SIMON

Never. The linkages are done by instinct. Sometimes I’ll write something and say, Right now this doesn’t mean very much but I have a hunch that later on in the play it will mean something. The thing I always do is play back on things I set up without any intention in the beginning. The foundation of the play is set in those first fifteen or twenty minutes. Whenever I get in trouble in the second act, I go back to the first act. The answers always lie there. One of the lines people have most often accused me of working backwards from is Felix Ungar’s note to Oscar in The Odd Couple. In the second act, Oscar has reeled off the laundry list of complaints he has about Felix, including “the little letters you leave me.” Now, when Felix is leaving one of those notes, telling Oscar they’re all out of cornflakes, I said to myself, How would he sign it? I know he’d do something that would annoy Oscar. So I signed it “Mr. Ungar.” Then I tried “Felix Ungar.” Then I tried “F.U.” and it was as if a bomb had exploded in the room. When Oscar says, “It took me three hours to figure out that F.U. was Felix Ungar,” it always gets this huge laugh.

INTERVIEWER

Felix Unger also appears in Come Blow Your Horn. I wanted to ask why you used the name twice.

SIMON

This will give you an indication of how little I thought my career would amount to. I thought The Odd Couple would probably be the end of my career, so it wouldn’t make any difference that I had used Felix Ungar in Come Blow Your Horn. It was a name that seemed to denote the prissiness of Felix, the perfect contrast to the name of Oscar. Oscar may not sound like a strong name, but it did to me—maybe because of the k sound in it.

INTERVIEWER

So you subscribe to the k-theory expressed by the comedians in The Sunshine Boys—k is funny.

SIMON

Oh, I do. Not only that, k cuts through the theater. You say a k-word, and they can hear it.

INTERVIEWER

Let’s talk about the mechanics of writing, starting with where you write.

SIMON

I have this office. There are four or five rooms in it and no one is here but me. No secretary, no one, and I’ve never once in the many years that I’ve come here ever felt lonely or even alone. I come in and the room is filled with—as corny as it might sound—these characters I’m writing, who are waiting each day for me to arrive and give them life. I’ve also written on airplanes, in dentist’s offices, on subways. I think it’s true for many writers. You blank out whatever is in front of your eyes. That’s why you see writers staring off into space. They’re not looking at “nothing,” they’re visualizing what they’re thinking. I never visualize what a play will look like on stage, I visualize what it looks like in life. I visualize being in that room where the mother is confronting the father.

INTERVIEWER

What tools do you use? Do you use a 1928 Underwood the way real writers are supposed to? Or a computer? You mentioned using a pad and pencil . . .