The Odd Couple (Criticism)

Criticism

Terry Nienhuis

Nienhuis is an associate professor of English at Western Carolina University. Here he discusses the mechanics of humor, Simon’s facility with comedy, and the playwright’s struggle to be recognized as more than a gag writer.

Neil Simon has been so successful financially and has become so popular with audiences that there is only one ambition left for him — to be taken seriously as an “artist.” The reluctance of critics to give him this respect continues to goad Simon and The Odd Couple is a worthy ground for examining this issue because it is his most famous play and still quite typical of his best work.

In the long history of English and American cultures there has always been a dichotomy between entertainment and art, but this cultural division and conflict has been intensified in America in the twentieth century as popular media have become more powerful and pervasive in American life. The radio, movies, television, cable television, and the wide availability of video recordings have made popular entertainment and popular culture an increasingly powerful force as we approach the beginning of a new century. Alongside or even against this rising tide of popular culture and entertainment stands a declining interest in books, in reading, and in classic literature. In some circles this situation is taken very seriously, as in the well-known book by social critic Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Postman claims that the public’s demand for entertainment has trivialized and even in some cases destroyed the culture’s capacities for rational discourse and careful analytical judgment. He compares the situation in twentieth-century America to the one in Aldous Huxley’s futuristic novel, Brave New World, where “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

Putting such diatribes aside, it is still clear that in the comedies of Neil Simon in general and in The Odd Couple in particular there is much to enjoy and admire. Initially, there is Simon’s verbal wit and his capacity for creating raucous laughter: The Odd Couple might be Simon’s most perfectly funny play. Those who study laughter analytically tell us that laughter usually comes from surprise — from our perception of incongruity, our delight in superiority, and our relief when forbidden subjects are brought out into the open so we can experience a release of psychic tension. In The Odd Couple our laughter comes predominantly from the surprise and perception of incongruity that occurs when we encounter Simon’s famous “one-liners.”

For example, in the play’s initial poker scene Murray chides Oscar for not paying his alimony, asking Oscar if it doesn’t bother him that his kids might not have enough to eat, and Oscar retorts: “Murray, Poland could live for a year on what my kids leave over from lunch!” This exaggeration takes us by surprise on many levels and can cause wild laughter in a typical audience. Psychologically, we probably are also laughing because we recognize that alongside the surprising incongruity there is a certain truth to Oscar’s remark — that Oscar’s wife still has plenty of money and that American children are very frequently spoiled. This is one way the comic one-liner can be described — sharp surprise from perceiving wild incongruity followed by a cognitive recognition that there is a paradoxical truth in the incongruity. The surprise catches our attention and the recognition gives us the pleasure of understanding. However, with Simon the weak link in the equation is usually with the recognition element. His one-liners are often fairly shallow on the cognitive side.

Compare, for example, a “one-liner” from Shakespeare. In Romeo and Juliet Mercutio has been fatally stabbed by Tybalt and Romeo says, “Courage, man, the hurt cannot be much” and Mercutio replies,“No, ‘tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ‘tis enough, ‘twill serve. Ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” This will be funny even in the context of Mercutio’s death because the incongruities are so striking, but the difference is that the “recognition” part of the one-liner is so much more important than the surprising incongruity. Mercutio’s quip is a sad reminder of our own mortality, a recognition that even a vital (though perhaps rash) human being like Mercutio can get caught very easily by mortal circumstances. Death will finally make the merry Mercutio “grave.” As Mercutio pays a price for his exaggerated vitality, perhaps too great a price to our way of thinking, Shakespeare insists that even in our laughter we must consider life in all its complexity. Even when he is being very funny, Shakespeare is more interested in the cognitive side of humor than he is in the belly laughs.

But Simon can also be appreciated for his exquisite theatrical craftsmanship; he is very adept at creating the effects he wants to achieve. The opening poker scene in The Odd Couple is a perfect example. Simon knew that if he established Oscar and Felix’s poker-playing buddies as an interesting and varied group before he introduced Oscar and Felix themselves he would be able to prepare his audience much more effectively for the entrance of his main characters. And with characteristic theatrical skill Simon does this from the first moment of the play. The play opens with the striking visual impression of Oscar’s messy and smoke-filled apartment and of Murray, Roy, Speed, and Vinnie sitting around the poker table with two chairs empty. Vinnie has the largest stack of poker chips and one of the early jokes will be Speed’s impatience at Vinnie’s desire to leave early with his winnings. Vinnie is nervously tapping his foot and checking his watch but Speed is even more impatient, an emotion that will be highlighted throughout the play by Oscar’s eventual reaction to living with Felix. Roy is watching Speed and Speed is glaring “with incredulity and utter fascination” at Murray, who is shuffling the cards with aggravating slowness. Thus, Simon creates tremendous theatrical interest and laughter even before anyone has spoken a word. With this tableaux established so exquisitely, Speed’s line, which opens the play, creates a laugh that few comic playwrights can so easily create: Speed “cups his chin in his hand,’” ‘looks at Murray,” and says, “Tell me, Mr. Maverick, is this your first time on the riverboat?” Already the audience is hooked. They want to know about these men and how they relate to one another. They wonder who will fill the two vacant chairs. And when Oscar finally arrives on stage, it has been clearly established that one of the missing chairs belongs to an eccentrically fussy person named Felix and that the messy condition of this apartment is a result of the carefree attitude of the host. Even Simon’s critics usually agree that in terms of play construction and theatre craft, Neil Simon takes a back seat to very few comic dramatists.

However, the critics have also been quick to point out that craftsmanship is only part of dramatic artistry. The most important aspect of art is what the writer has to say about human experience. The critics often refer to Simon as a mere “gag-man,” and if laughter were the deciding factor in evaluating comedy, Simon’s quality would be much easier to discern. Someone could simply use a machine to measure the audience’s laughter, and the longest and loudest guffaws might easily declare Simon the greatest of comic writers. But more academic critics have implied that volume and duration of laughter are not sufficient and perhaps not even necessary conditions for great comedy. In fact, many great comic moments provoke smiles rather than laughter and sometimes comedy even evokes pathos. What is essential to a great comedy appears to be not laughter but a provocative comic vision.

What is a “comic vision”? It is an approach to comedy that includes not only laughter but also a thoughtful, even philosophical way of looking at the human experience. The eighteenth-century English politician and man of letters Horace Walpole once said that “this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.” The tragic vision has been defined in many ways but perhaps tragedy shows us that our defeats can be partial victories. The comic vision, on the other hand, might show us that our victories always imply partial defeat, if for no other reason than that we can never completely extinguish our follies or life’s hardship and pain. In the most powerful comedies, the happy ending always has an alloy of harsh reality, as in the ending of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, for example, where many lovers are paired up and happy but the noble Don Pedro is left conspicuously alone.

Some of Simon’s comedies have flirted with darker materials, plays like The Gingerbread Lady (1970), God’s Favorite (1974), and Lost in Yonkers (1991), but they have been unconvincing for audiences and critics alike. Simon seems to lack the intellectual and emotional depth to tread in such waters, and The Odd Couple is yet another example. Johnson reports that Simon “originally envisioned The Odd Couple as ‘a black comedy,’” but there is nothing left of that original conception. Oscar and Felix are lovable eccentrics and their conflict has no convincingly serious or thought-provoking elements. This is perhaps clearest at the end when Oscar talks on the phone with his wife. Here Oscar becomes a merely sentimental hero as he turns over a new leaf and reveals that underneath he was always a better person than he appeared to be. Felix, on the other hand, departs shrouded in a little more mystery, but Simon does not exploit the thematic possibilities in this mystery and simply terminates the conflict between Oscar and Felix with an echo of the joke that closed Act I. Oscar and Felix address one another by their wives’ names, saying, “So long, Frances. So long, Blanche.” The audience will laugh once more at this verbal surprise because yet another incongruity has struck them. However, after the laughter passes there is no significant recognition phase where the incongruity reveals something thought-provoking and profound about Oscar, Felix, or human life in general.

Source: Terry Nienhuis, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• Any of the plays of Britain’s Alan Ayckbourn, who is often referred to as the “British Neil Simon” because of his commercial popularity, his ability to create laughter, and his prolific number of hits. More respected by critics, Ayckbourn is signficantly more daring technically and much more profound in his use of comedy than Simon.
• Taking Laughter Seriously, by John Morreall, SUNY Press, 1983. A concise discussion of the psychological elements that underlie laughter, with a concluding chapter discussing humor as a way of looking at life.
• The Gingerbread Lady (1970), God’s Favorite (1974), Chapter Two (1977), or Lost in Yonkers (1991) as examples of Neil Simon plays that work with darker materials and make more of an attempt to balance humor with seriousness.
• The Sunshine Boys (1972) for another fascinating Neil Simon “pair,” this time two, old, vaudevillian comics who have a love-hate relationship with one another.