Danny Simon may have helped write one of the most successful comedies in history—and then gave it away.
I met him in the mid-1980s when he flew to Edmonton to lecture on comedy writing at the University of Alberta’s TV and Film Institute, where I was director. Driving him down Groat Road, past the sweep of the river valley, he admired the view, then casually began telling me how The Odd Couple came to be.
“I wrote most of it,” he said.
It wasn’t bragging. It was closer to confession.
Danny described working through what he remembered as two and a half acts before hitting a wall. Stuck, he handed the pages—and the problem—to his younger brother, Neil.
“You just gave away most of one of the most successful plays in the world?” I asked.
“Well, maybe there weren’t quite two and a half acts,” Danny said. “Neil kept calling, asking what happens next. I’d give him ideas. Finally I told him—if you want to finish it, it’s yours.”
Neil offered to split it. Danny waved that off. “Give me ten percent if you want,” he said. Neil countered with twenty-five. They settled at seventeen and a half. The lawyers drew it up. Danny signed.
And that was that.
The Odd Couple went on to become a cultural landmark—endless stage productions, films, television adaptations. It made careers. It made fortunes. It made Neil Simon the king of Broadway.
Danny did fine. Seventeen and a half percent of a phenomenon is still a lot of money. Years later, in his Sherman Oaks condo, he showed me a royalty check for $65,000—just his share for part of a year.
Still, there are numbers that don’t add up.
After Neil completed the play, Danny asked if he could at least have a nod on the poster. Something small: “based on an idea by Danny Simon.”
Neil said no.
The brothers fell out. For years, they barely spoke. Before that, they had been a team—two of the best script doctors in the business, men who could fix anything. Afterward, one became famous for creating something enduring. The other became the man who might have.
At the height of Neil’s success, he once rented a banquet room at the Plaza Hotel for their mother’s birthday. A dozen of her friends were invited. At the last minute, Neil couldn’t make it.
When Danny heard, he decided to go in his place. He brought along their mother’s favorite chocolate and showed up to keep the celebration intact.
When he arrived, his mother inroduced Danny to her guests. “Girls,” he said, “this is Neil’s brother.”
Danny smiled. Then left. He told me he cried on the way home.
Danny made a living teaching comedy, writing, consulting. He had stories, contacts, and a sharp, unfiltered wit. He could still command a room. But there was always a sense that something essential had slipped through his fingers.
“Do you think it was a bad career move?” I asked him once.
“Sure.”
He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to.
Comedians are supposed to be funny. They’re not always supposed to be happy. Danny was funny. Effortlessly so. But happy? Not often.
He was in his sixties when he started asking me to set him up on dates. My wife was a flight attendant with United Airlines, and Danny was convinced she must know “some hot chicks.” We tried.
Eventually, we found someone—smart, attractive, gracious. Danny was intrigued, but wary. “I don’t like meeting women one-on-one,” he said. “Let’s have a party. Make sure she plays golf.”
A dozen people, food, drinks, laughter. His date showed up and did everything right—warm, attentive, clearly interested. She sat on the floor gazing adoringly up at him.
Danny ignored her.
The next day I asked what happened.
“She was Japanese,” he said. “I only like Chinese women.”
“You didn’t even talk to her,” I said.
“Trust me,” he said. “Japanese.”
There was no arguing with him. Logic didn’t apply. Timing did, though. A beat later, he added, “You’re on the right track. Good party. What else has your wife got for me?”
Danny had a comedian’s instinct for rhythm, even in real life. He knew when to drop a line.
“I want someone who’s good in bed,” he told me once. “But at my age, you’re going to have to lower me onto her with ropes.”
“So what do you want—a winch or a wench?” I asked.
A pause.
“That’s funny,” he said.
“I don’t hear you laughing.”
“Do you know the hard part of that joke?” he asked.
“What?”
“The setup. I gave you the setup. Being a straight man—that takes real talent. The punch line is easy. I’m probably the world’s greatest straight man.”
It was a throwaway line. It was also, maybe, the truest thing he ever said.
One night in Edmonton, we were invited to dinner at the home of Justice Tevie Miller, one of Alberta’s most respected citizens. Beautiful house, overlooking the river valley. Polished, elegant, the kind of place where people measure their words.
Danny walked in, took a look around, and said, “Great place you got here, Judge. You on the take?”
The room froze.
For a moment, it looked like the evening might end before it began. Then Justice Miller laughed, and the tension dissolved. Dinner went on, and it was a good one.
Danny had that effect. He could walk right up to the edge of disaster, peer over, and somehow step back just in time.
Most of the time.
Late in his life, Danny attended a Writers Guild meeting—one of those crowded rooms filled with a few hundred writers, all with strong opinions and louder voices, each determined to be heard.
Danny stood up and announced that he happened to be the best writer in the group.
From the back of the room, someone shouted, “You’re not even the best writer in your own family.”
The room erupted.
Writers laughed. Some winced. Danny, who had spent a lifetime understanding timing, didn’t need anyone to explain the punch line.
He lived to 85. He taught comedy to a generation of writers, passing along what he knew—timing, structure, the invisible mechanics of making people laugh.
But influence is not the same as ownership.
Danny Simon helped shape something the world will remember for a very long time. He also spent much of his life knowing it might have been his, more fully than it was.
That’s not a tragedy. It’s something quieter. A lingering imbalance. A joke where the setup and the punch line never quite belong to the same person.
He warned me that the setup is the hard part—that being the straight man takes real talent.
He might have been right. And if he was, then Danny Simon wasn’t just part of The Odd Couple. He was the part that made it possible.
The rest is what got the applause.
I wish he were here to argue with that—and, more likely, to fix the ending.
