But my sense of humour, that part of me which seemed more precious than any other facet of my Jewishness — that was from Neil Simon.
Like most people of my generation, I was introduced to Simon’s plays through the film versions on television. The first was Barefoot in the Park about newlyweds Corie and Paul (played by Jane Fonda and Robert Redford) who move into a freezing New York apartment on the top floor of a nine-storey Brownstone with no lift.
I was maybe 11 and suddenly I was laughing at what witty people said instead of whatever slightly stupid thing they did, the staple of British comedy. I still had a couple of years to go before my barmitzvah but as Simon’s lines drifted out of the TV they embedded themselves into my brain like commandments delivered from Sinai. Take the moment when, having climbed the stairs to Corie’s apartment, her exhausted mother takes in the surroundings and does her best to say something nice. “I feel like we’re in heaven,” she gasps. “Only we had to climb”.
Then came Plaza Suite, with Walter Matthau as the exasperated father of a bride who has locked herself in a hotel bathroom. Matthau shouts through the keyhole: “Don’t cry on your dress. Use a towel”. Or the rich but lovelorn movie producer Kiplinger (also Matthau) who declares,“I’ve got a 360-degree bed and 180 degrees of it are empty”. Followed by a prissy Jack Lemmon in The Odd Couple who cooks dinner for his unappreciative other half (Matthau again) and then declares, “If we don’t eat in the next 15 seconds the whole evening’s ruined!”
None of these works were as Jewish as Simon’s most overtly Jewish works, such as Lost in Yonkers. But compared even to the really good British stuff like Steptoe and Son, Simon’s New York dialogue made me think I had been born in the wrong city. Part of me still does.
Of course, there were many other great lines from other great Jewish New York funnymen, not least Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, Simon’s fellow writers on the Sid Caesar show.
But as brilliant as they were (and are), most of their one-liners — “Blood! That should be on the inside” (Allen’s Bananas, 1971) — were bound up with the characters they played. Simon’s were drawn from life situations — situations I could imagine living myself someday. Maybe I would even get to say some of those lines.
So when Simon, then 82, agreed to speak to me from his New York home a few days before the opening night of the musical Sweet Charity. for which he wrote the book, the lines I loved spooled through my head.
“You wrote dialogue that moulded me”, I gushed. And then I made my mistake. Quoting this line and that, I told him that, for me, he wasn’t just the king of Broadway, he was the all-time of king of the one-liner.
“I wrote plays, not just lines”, he said. And of course he was right. If nothing else, Simon was as brilliant an exponent of the “well made play” as Shaw, and I had failed to give him his due. It got worse when I tried to draw him out on whether, despite the incomparable commercial and critical success, he had felt that his plays had been under-appreciated.
His answers came in vague half sentences that only later made sense when I read reports that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s. And then in an attempt to end the conversation on a positive note, I told him how much I was looking forward to Sweet Charity and particularly the line Charity says while at a party fully of celebrities: “I’m the only one here I never heard of.”
A chuckle trickled down the phone line, and at last the moment I had hoped for happened: me and Simon laughing at one of his lines. “Yes”, he said. That was a good one.”
