The Odd Couple

Playwright Neil Simon's The Odd Couple premiered on Broadway in 1965 as racial unrest, a resurgence of feminism, the youth counterculture, and a sharp rise in the divorce rate challenged conventional images of the dependable white middle-class husband/provider. At the same time, the success of Playboy magazine (established in 1953) heralded a new male ideal of bachelorhood, leisure, and conspicuous consumption. Simon's play addressed these shifting understandings of manhood.

A humorous story of two single white middle-class men thrust together through desperation and divorce, the play featured Walter Matthau as the chronic slob Oscar Madison and Art Carney as the emotional neatnik Felix Unger. Simon's story would eventually appear in both film and television versions, as well as a revamped stage version, providing an ongoing vehicle for the investigation of gender roles, male bonding, bachelorhood, and homosocial living in America.

The Odd Couple questioned Playboy's glamorized notion of the carefree playboy: Felix is completely unable to function outside of wedlock, and Oscar's repugnant apartment suggests his inability to realize Playboy's hip bachelor pad. Instead, the play's opening poker game—rife with smoke, warm beer, and rotten sandwiches—establishes an unappealing male world of divorcés, bachelors, and absentee husbands. As the various characters struggle to forge stable homosocial (and sometimes heterosocial) bonds (and to comfort the suicidal Felix), they reveal both the vulnerability and the emotional sensitivity generated in men by the experience of divorce.

By focusing mainly on the homosocial world of men, and by juxtaposing the traditionally pejorative male characteristics of Oscar (lascivious, loud, irresponsible, and sloppy) with the classically feminine characteristics of Felix (emotional, domestic, priggish, and henpecking—the very traits that led to his divorce), the play ultimately suggests that masculinity is a fluid and changeable identity, rather than a natural and fixed group of characteristics. As Oscar and Felix battle for control, they compromise, each unknowingly absorbing a bit of the other's traits. As a result, they find a new masculine identity—one that resembled the emerging sensitive male ideal of the 1970s— and emerge independent at the end of the play.

In 1968, The Odd Couple re-emerged as a film starring Jack Lemmon as Felix and Matthau reprising his stage role. The film remained textually loyal to the original, but differed in that the action extended from the apartment to include restaurants, strip clubs, and bowling alleys. This spatial diversity facilitated the inclusion of women who symbolize the desired but mysterious and elusive female sex. By highlighting the uncertainty of the world outside the apartment, these figures underscore both the men's homosocial bonding and their vulnerability.

Recycling the script further, Jack Klugman and Tony Randall reprised Oscar and Felix in television's The Odd Couple (1970–75), as did the African–American actors Demond Wilson and Ron Glass in The New Odd Couple (1982–83). The latter served as one of the few prime-time shows of the period that featured African Americans in leading roles. A female version of the play opened on Broadway in 1985, with Rita Moreno as Olive (Oscar) and Sally Struthers as Florence (Felix). This incarnation fared poorly, however, perhaps because a looser cultural rein on images of femininity rendered the juxtaposition less effective. Throughout its multiple incarnations, Simon's script has reflected an ongoing cultural exploration of the ties that bind popular notions of American gender roles.

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