"... Simon and Garfunkel also played a high-profile gig at Gerde’s Folk City in the Village, and a couple of shows at the Gaslight Cafe. The audiences there, though, regarded them as a complete joke..."

"... Dave Van Ronk would later relate that for weeks afterwards, all anyone had to do was sing 'Hello darkness, my old friend,' for everyone around to break into laughter. Bob Dylan was one of those who laughed at the performance — though Robert Shelton later said that Dylan hadn’t been laughing at them, specifically, he’d just had a fit of the giggles — and this had led to a certain amount of anger from Simon towards Dylan."

That's from the podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," "Episode 135: 'The Sound of Silence' by Simon and Garfunkel." 

I've never been much of a Simon and Garfunkel fan, though, of course, I've often enjoyed listening to their songs. They did seem self-absorbedly gloomy, and I completely identify with the people who thought it was funny to intone — out of the blue — "Hello darkness, my old friend." I have a vivid memory from 1965, when "I Am a Rock" was a hit, and I was 14. I was with some of my girlfriends and a boy from our class, walking by, suddenly and, I think sincerely, sang out "I Am a Rock." Oh, how we laughed at him! It still makes me laugh. You're a rock, are you? That's so interesting. I guess if he was a rock, our derision didn't hurt him.

Knowing little of S&G's background, I learned a lot from that episode:

Neither Paul Simon or Art Garfunkel had many friends when they met in a school performance of Alice in Wonderland, where Simon was playing the White Rabbit and Garfunkel the Cheshire Cat. Simon was well-enough liked, by all accounts, but he’d been put on an accelerated programme for gifted students which meant he was progressing through school faster than his peers. He had a small social group, mostly based around playing baseball, but wasn’t one of the popular kids. 

Art Garfunkel, another gifted student, had no friends at all until he got to know Simon, who he described later as his “one and only friend” in this time period. One passage in Garfunkel’s autobiography seems to me to sum up everything about Garfunkel’s personality as a child — and indeed a large part of his personality as it comes across in interviews to this day. He talks about the pleasure he got from listening to the chart rundown on the radio — “It was the numbers that got me. I kept meticulous lists—when a new singer like Tony Bennett came onto the charts with “Rags to Riches,” I watched the record jump from, say, #23 to #14 in a week. The mathematics of the jumps went to my sense of fun.”

I also learned that Garfunkel has kept a list of all the books he's read, going back to 1968 and up through the present day, and you can read the whole list on line, here. It's highly aspirational, beginning with Jean Jacques Rousseau's "Confessions," and full of great classics. As kids, though, Paul and Art bonded over Mad Magazine.

By the way, I love "Waters of March" as sung by Art Garfunkel (which I only discovered recently and only because Spotify pushed it at me).