RIP Neil Simon

Neil Simon, Broadway’s long-reigning king of comedy, dies at 91

 Neil Simon in 1994. Photograph: Gary Stuart/AP
Image courtesy of theguardian.com

Click here to watch some scenes from Neil Simon's most well-known shows including:

• Barefoot in the Park
• The Odd Couple 
• Promises, Promises
• And more

Here's the beginning of Neil Simon's Obituary from the Washington Post. 

By Adam Bernstein

August 26

Neil Simon, the Pulitzer- and Tony-winning author of such plays as “The Odd Couple,” “Barefoot in the Park” and “Lost in Yonkers,” who died Aug. 26 at 91, was often called the world’s most popular playwright after Shakespeare.

Time magazine proclaimed him the “patron saint of laughter.” His shows, with an arsenal of sarcastic wit, became highly entertaining staples of high school and community theaters, and they popped up on stages as far away as Beijing and Moscow. But mostly, he dominated Broadway like no other playwright of the past half-century.

Hardly a year passed from 1961 to 1993 without a new production by Mr. Simon, a colossally successful run of comedies and comic dramas on topics such as romance, adultery, divorce, sibling rivalry, cancer and the fear of aging. Several are regarded as classics of 20th-century American theater.

Frequently, Mr. Simon’s plays centered on white, middle-class Americans — mostly New Yorkers and mainly Jews — but the characters were universally relatable. He considered himself “an investigator” of the quotidian. “I don’t write social and political plays, because I’ve always thought the family was the microcosm of what goes on in the world,” Mr. Simon told the Paris Review in 1992. “I write about the small wars that eventually become the big wars.”

His output included dozens of plays, the scripts for five hit musicals, more than 20 screenplays and two volumes of memoirs. Many of his earliest shows were directed by Mike Nichols, who once said that much of Mr. Simon’s work will endure because of its “recognizability” — mining laughs from situations familiar to a vast middle-class public.

Click here to read the obit in its entirety.