Situation

Very often a comedy will succeed because it starts with an inherently funny situation. Take for instance two very close friends being thrown together as roommates and discovering they can't live with one another because one is obsessively neat and the other is habitually messy. This is the situation in Neil Simon's, The Odd Couple, one of his most successful stage comedies. Simon's characters, Felix and Oscar, repeated their roles in both a movie and a long-running television sitcom and then spawned a female version of the play where all the genders of the characters were reversed.

Much of the enduring success of Simon's creation is due to the humor inherent to the initial comic situation. In fact, Simon sold the movie rights to The Odd Couple, even before he had written the play itself, on the basis of a thirty-two word sentence that simply described the "situation...