Neil Simon’s 'The Odd Couple': Why Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar are unable to live with each other

“I am a creature controlled by some cruel fate that had twisted and warped my personality so that at the first sign of personal involvement, I became transformed from human being into the most feared and dangerous beast on earth, the observer-writer”, says Neil Simon, calling himself “a monster who finds himself totally involved in situations, and then suddenly and without warning steps back to watch the proceeding”.
Some call Simon “Broadway’s most successful playwright” , others “in commercial terms, the most successful dramatist in the American theatre, and probably in the history of the world”. Fact is, he has had dozens of plays produced and “has been showered with more Academy and Tony nominations than any other writer”.
Born on July 4, 1927, Marvin Neil Simon grew up in Manhattan and shortly attended New York University and the University of Denver. His most significant job came in the early 1950s when he started writing for television comedy series. By the 1960s, Simon had begun to concentrate on writing plays for Broadway. His first hit was ‘Come Blow Your Horn’ in 1961. Throughout his career, Simon “has drawn extensively on his own life and experience for materials for his plays”. The author’s “milieu is middle-aged, middle class New York [, neighborhoods he knows well from when he was a child], and he builds much of his humor on the familiarity of that world to his audience”.
But Simon is probably best known for his characters Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar from his 1965 playwright ‘The Odd Couple’. “Neil Simon's fabulously funny creation The Odd Couple started out in 1965 as a Broadway play, became a movie in 1968 and then was adapted for TV by ABC in 1970, remaining on screen for five years and more than a hundred episodes” , as well as used for other derivative works and spin-offs. In his plays, above all in this play, Neil Simon delivers insight in the life of egocentric people and their struggle in society, “his characters are more or less well-meaning blunderers on dead-end roads” . It does not matter “ob es um Ehe, Freundschaft oder Eltern-Kind-Beziehungen geht, immer steht das Aufeinanderprallen gegensätzlicher Lebenseinstellungen zweier Menschen im Ringen um eine mögliche Form des Zusammenlebens im Mittelpunkt”