He landed his first professional writing job as a sports editor for an Army paper and even studied for a year at the University of Denver before returning to New York. As World War II drew to a close, Simon served, first in Biloxi, Mississippi (as in Biloxi Blues), and then in Denver, Colorado. Simon spent a year at New York University before enlisting in the Army Air Corps Reserve. From an early age, Simon learned to cope with pain by turning it into comedy his lifelong nickname “Doc” came from his childhood gag of imitating the family physician. Like Eugene, Simon spent his childhood in poverty in New York during the Depression, with a fractious Jewish family and a smart big brother (Danny Simon, who, like Stan Jerome in Broadway Bound, would become his kid brother’s first comedy-writing partner). In fact, Marvin Neil Simon was born in the Bronx on July 4, 1927, and grew up in the Washington Heights section of Upper Manhattan. It may surprise fans of Simon’s Brighton Beach trilogy that he didn't actually grow up in Brooklyn like alter ego Eugene Morris Jerome. He wrote 34 of those laughter-through-tears plays, 25 movies, and countless hours of television before his death on August 26 at 91. “I’ve always felt, and I still do, that every play I write is a drama that has its comic moments,” he said in 1994.
#Neil simon cracked#
The man who cracked up Broadway audiences, moviegoers, and TV viewers for more than 60 years, claimed he never wrote a joke but rather, made a practice of pushing the tragic until it became funny. This despite his being the most successful comedy writer and playwright of the 20th century, and perhaps ever.
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