The Human Condition and Neil Simon

    Without outing too much info that is private, I have a few words.

   We lost Neil Simon, one of our more prolific playwrights, a few weeks ago. I directed the male version of The Odd Couple  at LHS my first year there, and  I used to use both versions in my Intro classes for final scene work, so I know the script pretty well. One of the reasons I chose it for class was cast size, it's easy to chunk out a six person scene for kids who struggle, and two person scenes or the date scene for kids who are solid. It's also "comedy", and the friendship aspect is accessible to all ages.It has everything you need for beginning actors, and on the surface it seems harmless.

   Which is the primary reason I chose it: it looks harmless. Admin doesn't look past the occasional "shit" or "goddamn" to the deeper themes, so it gets a pass.

    Neil Simon, as all great comedic writers and actors, took on the true suffering of the human condition, laid it out as plainly as he could, and made us laugh at it. He made tragic disorders-and suicide attempts-funny. Because we need to not take ourselves too seriously.

    Today's lesson, as it applies to the last eight days of my life, is about Felix.

    Felix is essentially a hot mess. He has physical ailments that are unconsciously self inflected due to his emotional behavioral disorder and OCD. Sinuses, tendinitis, his wife can't wear perfume, etc. He is also a compulsive cleaner, he can't stop cleaning even after it's clean. They hired a maid and he cleaned before and after the maid came. A marriage counselor threw them out declaring that he was a nut. This was written in 1964, long before we were diagnosing any of the issues that Felix so plainly displays. Yet here they are, 54 years later, clearly diagnoseable and not funny when they are in your own home.

     Felix is making a sound like a moose, trying to "clear" his sinuses. Oscar says "Leave yourself alone, Felix, don't tinker". This line is one that stabs my heart every time. OCD and anxiety can lead to "tinkering": picking at your skin, pulling on your hair, other  compulsive behaviors. You can try to use that line on the person you love, but it doesn't work. They cannot stop themselves. It's like having tunnel vision and they cannot see anything else. Sometimes they obsess over pets or moments in relationships, and live them over and over again, unable to let go. If they are fortunate enough to have depression and anxiety as well, they change the story in their head every time they recall it, trying to make it make sense. Because so many times when people do things, out of fear or anger or just because they are selfish, a reasonable person with a disorder cannot make sense of it. So they make themselves sick trying to make sense of something that makes no sense.

     Before Felix enters, the poker boys are discussing the failure of his marriage. "He'll go to pieces. Remember when Frances broke up with him in the army? He started cleaning guns in his mouth".
Later Oscar says that Felix has a "Love me or I'll jump" approach to relationships. This is hilarious because it's too true and too close to home for us to discuss in polite society. That much pain is not to be openly admitted to, if you can't handle a break up then you shouldn't be in society, right? Maybe you need to just man up and get over it, because this type of behavior is funny. We're making fun of you.

   Except that he isn't. Neil Simon isn't making fun of it. Neil Simon felt it and had no idea what to do with these feelings, or how to handle them, so he wrote plays. He's identifying it, not judging. He got us to laugh at the very thing that should kill us.  He is quietly trying to force us to recognize this kind of pain, and to be there for our friends and each other when it hits. And to show us that from the outside, it can be pretty damned funny. Maybe we need to breathe and step outside of ourselves in that moment and just laugh at the absurdity of the whole situation.  Get a good laugh, eat some Ovaltine and go to bed. Genius.

   Carrie Fischer did this as well. My favorite novel of hers Postcards From The Edge , opens with a monologue I used for years at auditions. So much pain and so much humor. "Maybe I shouldn't have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but what was I supposed to do? ...I threw up scallops and Percodan all over him the night before in the Emergency Room, I thought it'd be rude not to give him my number." Pure genius. We are all in pain in some way, and most of us are nuts, but only a clever few have managed to communicate their pain through humor. And I love them.

   As a teacher I've seen all of the archetypes, and I watch them deal with whatever their issue is, or not. Everybody has issues. Sorry guys, nobody is issue free: nobody. I don't care how your family looks or how successful you are, nobody is completely OK. I worry most about the ones who aren't dealing, who are scurrying for the high GPA, involved in every aspect of school leaving no time to actually address who they are. They look fine, but when you talk to them you can glimpse what is truly at the core. They are driven because they are running, or because they are being pushed. I am not saying that those are both bad choices, but if you aren't aware of which one is happening, you're going to crash at some point. The ones who are self aware, who seek help from counselors and teachers, who appear to be the "hot messes", or who Jim named my "Lost Boys" years ago, those people are the most honest. They acknowledge that It's Not Ok, and they are desperately searching for someone to help them make sense of it all.

   Felix today is hard to understand outside of the time period in which he was written. By today's standards, with so much therapy available and psychiatrists in love with meds, and armchair Know It Alls like myself, he loses his soul. His pain is diminished in the name of making his disorders seem funny. What made them "funny" originally was how they destroyed his life and relationships, and were honestly out of his control. We laughed because we saw ourselves in him, and how can he be so blind? Jack Lemmon understood. So did Tony Randall. Because they played him in the time period in which he lived, and they knew his pain. Thanks to them, so did we, and we laughed because we wanted to cry, because it is ridiculous. The human condition is painful and ridiculous. 

     I'm not sure I got to my point. But I got what I needed off of my chest for the moment. I'm working my way back to humor blogs. I hope to return soon. Maybe from the other side I can channel Neil Simon, or Carrie, or Erma Bombeck and return. It was a lot easier to look at my human condition with humor when it was just me.

   Thanks for reading.