Professor David Peimer
Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple
Summary
An entertaining and critical scene-by-scene appreciation of the 1968 film The Odd Couple, written by acclaimed playwright and screenwriter Neil Simon, who was nominated for more Oscar and Tony awards than any writer in history.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
That’s a very interesting question. We’d need to look at so many of the other great comedy writers and actors, the much more recent ones. There is an influence on Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. In the classic comedy structure, Seinfeld is the straightforward fall guy and Larry David is the obsessive neurotic.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you say that Simon creates characters who have characteristics common to us all, whereas Groucho is working with much more physicalized and caricature. So the irony is more in the physicality and the caricature of what Groucho is doing.
Interesting, I don’t think he did. I think as far as I have researched and read, he would go and watch as a young kid in the way that Neil Simon, I think, went to what the great early comedy movies.