Simon Says!

I read Larry Wilde’s, “How the Great Comedy Writers Create Laughter”, this last week, and found it quite interesting. I always wondered what the difference between a comic and a comedy writer might be, and, moreover, why a writer wouldn’t want to be a performer of his own material? Neil Simon gave an interesting response to a question posed by Mr. Wilde:

“What motivates someone like you to be satisfied to hear audience laughter from the back of the theatre as opposed to someone who has to get up and get laughs in front of an audience?”

“Well, I’m not quite sure what his drive is. There are comedians who are not funny at all but who say very funny things written by other people. The go out and say those same things over and over again. I can’t imagine what kind of joy they get, except if they do it in terms of an actor. I don’t think they do, because an actor usually puts himself behind the mask of a character he’s playing. He’s projecting a little of himself in this other character. The comic doing the same jokes over and over – I don’t know what kind of satisfaction he gets except for making a living.


If I’m at a party and on a rare occasion I say something funny and there’s a big laugh and people say, “You’ve got to tell so and so over there.” I can’t do it for the life of me – say it again. I’ve just done it. The moment is gone for me. Let me give you an example:


I was on the Johnny Carson show, and he asked me about the first joke I had ever written on the Sid Caesar show. I related the joke and it got an enormous laugh. The laugh I got from the audience was not as satisfying to me as two moments. One, when I made up the joke years before, and the first time the audience laughed at it on the air when Sid Caesar did it. When I did it I was just repeating something. I could have repeated somebody else’s joke and got the same laugh from the audience. That’s not my particular way of getting gratification.”

I kind of, ‘get’, what Simon is saying here, but can’t completely agree with it from my point of view. Yes, I do take pleasure on those rare occasions when I present something funny in printed form, and there is no greater pleasure than the serendipitous occurrence of genuine wit; that is, the intersection of the perfect spoken words at the perfect moment! However, if you were to count on that ‘Serendipity’ on a comedy stage you would, in all likelihood, be disappointed.

There is greater safety in just creating the funny lines that a comic or characters deliver on stage; at the same time, it seems to me, that the fellow that wrote the lines should have to be up there, on stage, to see what the audience’s reaction to them will be, and that is not safe at all! At the same time, while I do find myself getting bored with material I’ve given before an audience too often, the instant gratification of delivering a good comedy set to a receptive audience is beyond compare! As I quoted Writer/Actor/Comic, Don Harron, elsewhere on this page:

"I'm addicted to the laughs. It's the strongest drug I've ever known. It makes heroin seem like aspirin. It wraps around you like love."