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Masterplots, Fourth Edition

The Odd Couple

by Terry Nienhuis

First produced: 1965; first published, 1966

Type of work: Drama

Type of plot: Comedy

Time of plot: Mid-1960’s

Locale: New York City

The Story:

The regular weekly poker game is under way on a hot summer night in the smoke-filled living room of the once well-kept and fashionable upper West Side apartment of divorced newspaper sports writer Oscar Madison. In the three months since his wife had divorced him, the easygoing, pleasant, but slovenly Oscar has managed to litter his New York City apartment with dirty dishes, discarded clothes, old newspapers, empty bottles, and other trash. Hosting the poker game, Oscar is serving his friends warm drinks (the refrigerator has been broken for two weeks) and green sandwiches that he declares were made from “either very new cheese or very old meat.” The other poker players are Oscar’s friends—Murray, Speed, Roy, and Vinnie. Felix Ungar, Oscar’s best friend, is uncustomarily late for the game, and all the poker players are worried about him.

A phone call to Felix’s wife reveals that Felix and his wife have just separated after twelve years of marriage and that Felix has disappeared, sending his wife a telegram threatening suicide. When Felix finally arrives at the poker game, all the players attempt to calm him by pretending that everything is normal. They steer Felix away from the twelfth-story window of the apartment and wait anxiously as Felix goes into the bathroom. Felix eventually confesses that he had swallowed a whole bottle of pills from his wife’s medicine cabinet and had then vomited. After the poker players depart, Oscar consoles Felix, who reveals that he does not want a divorce and had stayed up the whole night before in a cheap Times Square hotel room considering a suicidal jump from the window. In an attempt to calm and help his friend, Oscar suggests that Felix move in with him. Felix, a fussy and compulsively neat person, agrees and immediately begins to clean up Oscar’s apartment.

At the next poker game, two weeks later, the atmosphere is very different because Felix is in charge. The apartment is immaculate, and Felix is taking orders for food and drink, serving carefully made sandwiches and ice-cold beer, reminding the poker players to put their glasses on coasters so as not to leave rings on the freshly polished table. A Pure-A-Tron air freshener eliminates the cigar and cigarette smoke, and Felix has even used disinfectant on the playing cards. This fussy behavior unnerves some of the other players as much as it had Oscar during the preceding week, and the game breaks up prematurely. Oscar is irritated but feels guilty about his anger and suggests to Felix that they lack excitement in their lives. Oscar suggests that they take out to dinner two single British women, Gwendolyn and Cecily Pigeon, from an upstairs apartment. Felix is not enthusiastic about the plan because he still misses his wife and children and wants to save his marriage, but Felix finally agrees to give the idea a try if he can cook the meal himself in Oscar’s apartment.

A few days later the evening comes for the dinner, and it is a disaster. Oscar is an hour late coming home from work and Felix is incensed because his carefully planned meal is jeopardized. When Gwendolyn and Cecily arrive, Felix is nervous, morose, and maudlin. Furthermore, he chills the romantic atmosphere Oscar is trying to create by tearfully sharing with the women snapshots of his wife and children. Nostalgically remembering their own spouses, Gwendolyn and Cecily join Felix in tears and decide that Felix is sensitive and sweet. Oscar is frustrated and angry that the potentially romantic evening has been ruined until the women suggest that they shift the dinner to their apartment upstairs. Oscar’s spirits are lifted until Felix refuses to cooperate, citing his loyalty to his wife and children. Before going upstairs alone, Oscar angrily offers the twelfth-story window as a possible place for Felix to jump from.

The next evening Oscar is still not talking to Felix. When Oscar comes home from work, Felix is preparing for the night’s poker game, cleaning up as usual, but Oscar purposely begins to make a mess. He pulls the plug on Felix’s vacuum cleaner, throws things on the floor, walks on the couch, and even takes from the table the linguini that Felix has fixed himself for supper and throws it onto the walls of the kitchen. In the ensuing argument, Oscar claims that everything about living with Felix for the last three weeks has irritated him. He then grabs a suitcase and demands that Felix move out of his apartment. Felix leaves, but when the other poker players arrive for the game they join Oscar in worrying about what Felix will do on his own. Felix then arrives and reveals that he has temporarily moved in upstairs with the Pigeon sisters. He admits that Oscar has done two wonderful things for him—taking him in and throwing him out—and Oscar and Felix finally shake hands. Felix agrees to return for next week’s poker game. After Felix leaves, the game resumes, with Oscar telling his friends to be a little more careful about their cigarette butts.

Critical Evaluation:

Neil Simon was one of the most successful commercial playwrights in the history of theater and likely the most recognizable of American playwrights. In creating a steady stream of Broadway hits, starting with Come Blow Your Horn (1961), Simon garnered numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 1991. Though critics often found his work to be sentimental, predictable, and shallow, Simon was consistently popular with Broadway, regional, and community theater audiences. In his most popular period, the mid-1960’s and early 1970’s, Simon at times had as many as four hits running simultaneously on Broadway.

The Odd Couple is probably the best-known Simon comedy, owing not only to its strikingly comic situation and distinctive main characters but also to the commercially successful spin-offs from the play—a well-received film adaptation in 1968, an enormously popular television series that ran from 1970 to 1975, and a female-version sequel in 1985. Simon’s plays, and especially his early plays, typically generate belly laughs through carefully orchestrated comic conflict, brisk pace, and extremely witty dialogue freely punctuated with comic one-liners. The Odd Couple has all of these.

The theme of The Odd Couple, if it has one, involves human incompatibility and the observation that compromise is necessary in any kind of marital-like relationship. Oscar and Felix illustrate that men who do not get along with their wives will probably be incompatible with others in precisely the same way. Regardless of the situation and genders involved, effective compromise in human relationships is rare. To some, however, this description of thematic elements in The Odd Couple might seem excessively academic. Do Simon’s plays really exist to investigate thematic issues? Some find his plays, and especially his later plays, convincing in their treatment of serious thematic issues, while others find nearly all of his plays quite shallow. A large majority, however, simply assert that Simon’s plays are just “good entertainment,” and that the theme of a Simon play is not intended to be profound.

The comedy of Simon in general and of The Odd Couple as a particular example ultimately raises the larger and very important issue of whether craftsmanship, the quality of making a thing well, suffices for literary quality and lasting literary fame. Whatever the answer to that question, there is no doubt that in terms of comic theater, Simon is an adept craftsman. Casual as his style might seem, in The Odd Couple, Simon leaves nothing to chance. Within the overall architecture of the play, which is amazingly tight and efficient, nearly every word is carefully chosen for its desired effect. For example, the first act of the play, busy as it is, merely establishes what the conflict will be (the “marriage” of an “odd couple”); the second act demonstrates this conflict in action; and the final act resolves the conflict. The success of the play, of course, depends on the intensity and interest generated by the Oscar and Felix relationship, but The Odd Couple is theatrically effective because it creates and maintains this focus without appearing too obviously to do so.

Nearly the first third of the play features mainly the poker players, who are interesting in themselves but function primarily as a way of introducing the eccentric and conflicting personalities of Oscar and Felix. They characterize Felix before he arrives and react to both Oscar and, once he arrives, Felix. After a brief period with Oscar and Felix onstage alone, the poker players return at the beginning of the second act. Here the reaction of Speed and Roy to Felix’s compulsive neatness mirrors Oscar’s point of view, while Murray and Vinnie, who like the new atmosphere created by Felix, contrast with Oscar’s response. Simon then uses the Pigeon sisters to advance the conflict between Oscar and Felix without reiterating the issue of Felix’s obsession with cleanliness. In the scenes with Gwendolyn and Cecily, Felix’s eccentricity takes the form of loyalty to his wife and family. This behavior further alienates him from Oscar but for slightly different reasons, which gives variety and texture to the conflict. In the final scenes of the play, Simon brings back the poker players and the Pigeon sisters to create a pleasing symmetry in the resolution of the conflict.

Simon’s craftsmanship is even more obvious on the level of comic dialogue, where he is the undisputed master of the witty one-liner. In act 1, for example, Roy says of Oscar’s refrigerator, “I saw milk standing in there that wasn’t even in the bottle.” The image of milk defying gravity surprises at first, then surprise turns to laughter when the exaggeration is seen as in some way appropriate—the milk was left in the refrigerator so long that the container disintegrated and left a sour solid. Simon’s skill with such verbal constructions is a testimony to his brilliance with language and to his training in the early 1950’s as a gag writer for television. Unsympathetic critics have faulted Simon for his reliance on the humor of one-liners, but there is no denying that he excels at their creation.

Further Reading

1 

Johnson, Robert K. Neil Simon. Boston: Twayne, 1983. A sophisticated book-length treatment of Simon’s work. Argues that Simon in The Odd Couple was pushing beyond the simpler comedy of earlier plays, but the third act of this play is weaker than the first two.

2 

Kerr, Walter. “What Simon Says.” The New York Times Magazine, March 22, 1970. A landmark essay on The Odd Couple by a major New York drama critic who consistently championed Simon’s work. Kerr considers Simon “to have discovered the exact amount of God’s truth a light comedy can properly contain.”

3 

Konas, Gary, ed. Neil Simon: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1997. Collection of essays examining Simon’s life and works, including discussions of his Jewish heritage and its influence on his plays, the serious themes in his comedies, and his female and gay characters. Contains two interviews with Simon and an interview with his longtime Broadway producer, Emanuel Azenberg. References to The Odd Couple are indexed.

4 

Koprince, Susan. Understanding Neil Simon. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. An overview of Simon’s career, with analyses of his major plays. Chapter 3 is devoted to The Odd Couple. Compares his work to Greek New Comedy, Jewish humor, and Anton Chekhov’s combination of humor and pathos. Describes the reasons for Simon’s popularity and commercial success.

5 

McGovern, Edythe M. Neil Simon: A Critical Study. 2d ed. New York: Ungar, 1979. The first full-length study of Simon’s work. The chapter on The Odd Couple asserts that Simon’s comedy captures the essence of human incompatibility, irrespective of gender or marital status, and demonstrates that the missing ingredient in such relationships is the ability to compromise.

6 

Simon, Neil. Oscar and Felix: A New Look at “The Odd Couple.” New York: Samuel French, 2004. More than thirty-five years after The Odd Couple debuted on Broadway, Simon decided the play was dated and should be rewritten to reflect American society in the early twenty-first century. He revised more than 60 percent of the dialogue, inserted references to computers and cell phones, and changed the characters of the two British sisters to two Spanish sisters. The updated version premiered in Los Angeles in 2002.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Nienhuis, Terry. "The Odd Couple." Masterplots, Fourth Edition, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=MP4_23899820000201.
APA 7th
Nienhuis, T. (2010). The Odd Couple. In L. W. Mazzeno (Ed.), Masterplots, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Nienhuis, Terry. "The Odd Couple." Edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno. Masterplots, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.