You know a comedy was good when there are lines in it that you can tell your friends and family over and over again — and they're always funny, no matter how many times you tell them.
Seems to me that just about every movie that was based on a Neil Simon play was like that. But I think it was especially true of "The Odd Couple," which was turned into a movie starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in 1968.
Matthau played Oscar, a sloppy sportswriter, and Lemmon was Felix, a compulsive neat freak who worked as a news writer. The play/film never established whether they worked for the same news organization, but they lived in New York, which then, as now, had several newspapers.
Anyway, their employer(s) didn't figure as an important part of the story. And the lines are still as good, still as funny as they were in 1968.
My grandmother was probably the best evidence of that. She wasn't the sort of person to recite humorous dialogue from movies, but there was one scene from "The Odd Couple" that always made her laugh. And she loved to tell it.
Oscar asks Felix to move his plate of pasta from the dining table. He calls it "spaghetti." Felix laughs.
Oscar asks him, "What the hell's so funny?"
Chuckling, Felix replies, "It's not spaghetti, it's linguini."
Without saying a word, Oscar picks up the plate of linguini and flings it at the kitchen wall.
He turns around and glares at Felix. "Now it's garbage," he says slowly, softly and deliberately.
I can't tell you how many times my grandmother told us about that scene — or how hard she laughed at the memory of it, years after she first saw it.
The story was really deceptively simple. Felix has been thrown out of the house and considers ending his life, but he winds up at the home of Oscar, his best friend, who gives him a place to stay. Seems like a good solution, right? Wrong. The two personalities are so different that they can't co–exist.
What ensues is some of the best dialogue ever written by Neil Simon. And it was delivered flawlessly by Lemmon and Matthau.
If you've never seen it, I won't spoil it for you by telling you some of the best lines. I'll just urge you to watch it.
You can see it tonight on Turner Classic Movies' "31 Days of Oscar."
It's on at 10:15 p.m. (Central).
