"But [Neil] Simon, who died Sunday at 91, didn’t know he was standing directly over a fault in American culture, one that even as he hit his stride started gapping and would eventually pull him down."

"Until then, he reliably provided the pleasure of exaggerated self-recognition, reflecting life but with palpable structure and better punch lines. In the theater, the shared assumptions between the playwright and his very homogeneous late-century audience — largely white and urban, often Jewish or at least Jewish-adjacent — had the redoubling effect necessary to raucous comedy.... In the late ’60s and early ’70s, as independent films were diversifying their outlook and shaking off the formulas of Hollywood storytelling, Broadway boulevard comedies like 'Last of the Red Hot Lovers' and 'California Suite' — tales of the befuddled nouveau riche in a new world — began to look mass-produced and middlebrow.... Sometimes, in the way that can happen when writers momentarily grab the tail of the zeitgeist, the laughs were even prescient.... [The plays] may be unjust to the harridans, simps and playthings he stocks them with but they tell a real story of male collapse that was relevant to the culture at the time they were first produced, and might still hold up better than the later, more 'serious' works. I think I understood that back in high school when, putting on my father’s clothes [to play a minor role in 'The Odd Couple'], I saw how poorly they fit. These kinds of men were already under siege, as everyone in 'The Odd Couple' sensed without saying so. Which somehow made the laughs even bigger."

From "Neil Simon Drew Big Laughs, Then Came a Cultural Shift" by Jesse Green (NYT).