Say what you will about Neil Simon, but there's no denying that he has a real nose for jokes; he doesn't go looking for laughs where they can't be found. So how can one account for "Fools," [an] almost total misfire …? This peculiar endeavor was destined to be fruitless from the moment the playwright dreamed it up. Why the shrewd Mr. Simon plunged ahead anyway is one of the minor mysteries of the Broadway season.

"Fools" is about Kulyenchikov, a mythical Ukrainian village of "long ago" whose residents all live under an evil curse of stupidity. It's a one-gag premise that might make for a dandy 10-minute Sid Caeser-Imogene Coca sketch or a throwaway anecdote in a Mel Brooks-Carl Reiner "2,000-Year-Old Man" routine. But a two-hour play? As one watches Mr. Simon, the director Mike Nichols and a topflight cast struggle to puff up this show, a feeling of unreality sets in. It's as if a team of brilliant high-priced surgeons has been assembled to operate on a splinter.

While Mr. Simon has come up with a few funny moments, there are only so many jokes that anyone can make about stupidity. Once we learn that the town peddler sells flowers as whitefish, that the town doctor can't read his own eye chart and that the town shepherd can't find his sheep, there's an inevitability about every punch line….

To stitch them all together, the playwright has come up with a story of sorts. The hero is a teacher named Leon—is he the lost offstage Leon of Mr. Simon's "They're Playing Our Song"?—who has come to Kulyenchikov to chase the curse away. Leon … quickly falls in love with the stupidest girl in town …—thus allowing Mr. Simon to hit us with a few more by the final curtain. We learn that love and self-respect can conquer ignorance, and, rather contradictorily, that ignorance can at times be bliss. This is not big news, and, even so, Mr. Simon must strain to deliver it. By Act II, the playwright is adding so many arbitrary last-minute secret clauses to the village's curse that the actors all but apologize for having to explain them to us.

Running about this ersatz fairybook land are seasoned comic actors who deserve a full-fledged Simon comedy…. But there's a limit to how much any of them can accomplish. Because virtually every character manifests the same stupidity—an inability to remember names, for instance—every actor seems to be playing the same role….

[What] we really have here is a formula for silliness, not comedy—and surely no one knows that better than Neil Simon. Maybe "Fools" is just an April fools' prank that somehow ran berserk.