Simon, Neil - James Lipton with Neil Simon (interview date Winter 1992)
James Lipton with Neil Simon (interview date Winter 1992)
“Neil Simon: The Art of Theater X,” in The Paris Review, Vol. 34, No. 125, Winter, 1992, pp. 167-213.
[In the following interview, Simon discusses the development of his plays from light to dark comedies.]
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...
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