Old-git territory

I’m not the biggest fan of Neil Simon, I admit it. In the programme notes for The Sunshine Boys, I discovered that Time magazine once called him ‘the patron saint of laughter’. Good, I thought. When the curtain goes up I’ve got someone to pray to.

The show opens with Danny DeVito slumped in a hotel room watching TV in mid-afternoon. He’s a spent vaudeville star whose feud with his comedy partner forced him into retirement 11 years earlier. His nephew, a pushy young agent, wants to revive the famous duo for one last TV special. DeVito insists that he won’t do it. (But he will, of course.)

The corny script unfolds exactly as I remember it from the 1975 film, which I was dragged to at the age of 12, and which starred an overexcited Walter Matthau and a partially mummified George Burns. Some old git in my family thought these old gits would be a hoot. They weren’t. But now, as I close in on old-git territory myself, I begin to see the draw. I understand! The frothy, knockabout script disguises a subtle and moving meditation on ageing, on loss and on the curiously addictive nature of love-hate friendships.

Simon’s writing isn’t quotable. It has few amphibious qualities. Extract a line from its native habitat and it expires on the spot. His great knack is to harmonise absurd humour with realism, and to create comedy and melancholy simultaneously. The closing scene shows the old foes reconciled (sort of), slumping in chairs, and exchanging funeral news and doctors’ notes about their advancing ailments.

Your trouble is your blood doesn’t circulate, says one. It does, comes the response, but not to the right places.

If that doesn’t make you laugh, you have no soul.