page_title: Neil Simon
section_title: Television comedy
hierarchical_section_title: Neil Simon / Writing career / Television comedy
caption_attribution_description: Mr. Neil Simon, author, sitting on windowsill at home pouring over a script of play he wrote / World Telegram &amp; Sun photo by Al Ravenna.
context_page_description: Marvin Neil Simon was an American playwright, screenwriter and author. He wrote more than 30 plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, mostly adaptations of his plays. He has received more combined Oscar and Tony Award nominations than any other writer.
  Simon grew up in New York City during the Great Depression. His parents' financial difficulties affected their marriage, giving him a mostly unhappy and unstable childhood. He often took refuge in movie theaters, where he enjoyed watching early comedians like Charlie Chaplin. After graduating from high school and serving a few years in the Army Air Force Reserve, he began writing comedy scripts for radio programs and popular early television shows. Among the latter were Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, and The Phil Silvers Show, which ran from 1955 to 1959.
  His first produced play was Come Blow Your Horn. It took him three years to complete and ran for 678 performances on Broadway. It was followed by two more successes, Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple. He won a Tony Award for the latter. It made him a national celebrity and "the hottest new playwright on Broadway."
context_section_description: Simon quit his job as a mailroom clerk in the Warner Brothers offices in Manhattan to write radio and television scripts with his brother Danny Simon, under the tutelage of radio humourist Goodman Ace, who ran a short-lived writing workshop for CBS. Their work for the radio series The Robert Q. Lewis Show  led to other writing jobs. Max Liebman hired the duo for the writing team of his popular television comedy series Your Show of Shows.  The program received Emmy Award nominations for Best Variety Show in 1951, 1952, 1953, and 1954, and won in 1952 and 1953. Simon later wrote scripts for The Phil Silvers Show, for episodes broadcast during 1958 and 1959.
  Simon later recalled the importance of these two writing jobs to his career: "Between the two of them, I spent five years and learned more about what I was eventually going to do than in any other previous experience." "I knew when I walked into Your Show of Shows, that this was the most talented group of writers that up until that time had ever been assembled together."
  Simon described a typical writing session:
  There were about seven writers, plus Sid, Carl Reiner, and Howie Morris ... Mel Brooks and maybe Woody Allen would write one of the other sketches ... everyone would pitch in and rewrite, so we all had a part of it ... It was probably the most enjoyable time I ever had in writing with other people.
  Simon incorporated some of these experiences into his play Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993). A 2001 TV adaptation of the play won him two Emmy Award nominations.
caption: Simon in 1966
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