What "When Harry Met Sally" Owes To "The Odd Couple"

Daniel M. Lavery @daniel_m_lavery

perhaps nothing is more responsible for the 21st century decline of the farce than the open floor plan. you cannot bustle into the dining room with vol-au-vents and a panicked smile if there's not a door swinging behind you, revealing a fire or inappropriate tryst.

“As the name suggests, an open-plan house flows from space to space with minimal barriers between the living areas or no barriers at all…[previously] public and private spaces in houses were divided up and closed off…With central heating from steam radiators, rooms were no longer dependent on fireplaces for warmth. Steel…increased builders’ ability to span open space. Concrete block made it easier to build unconventional load-bearing walls…By the turn of the 20th century, residential lots were smaller and house plans had to make more economical use of space. The open plan was the right choice for turning a tight floor plan into a well-zoned interior that adjusted to a family’s needs.”

—Old House, “Evolution of the Open Floor Plan,” 2021.

It feels spiritually, if not literally, true that you couldn’t make The Odd Couple today. They very much do remake The Odd Couple every couple of years — it’s the late twentieth century’s Enoch Arden — most recently as a multi-cam sitcom for CBS starring Matthew Perry and Thomas Lennon in 2015, which might look like a good idea from a distance but falls apart the closer you get to it.

The Odd Couple deals in a kind of comedy that depended on interior doors, shared taboos, a clear-cut division between public and private, rigorous rules of politeness, and which died a slow and ignominious death with the rise of the open-floor-plan that turns every house into an oversized studio apartment, and the “Did that just happen?”/“So that just happened…” humor of 1990s/early aughts sitcoms and commercials where groups of friends sprawl around in undifferentiated spaces, remarking on everything that happens around them because nothing can be hidden from view. It can’t exist in the kind of apartment where the living area/common area/dining area flows seamlessly into the kitchen, where only the bathroom and the bedrooms still have doors on them. 1968’s Oscar might reasonably leave the room to mix drinks, leaving Felix alone with the Pigeon Sisters to comic effect, but 2023’s Oscar would not — his bar cart would abut the floating island replacing the wall that used to separate the kitchen from the dining room (the living room having been done away with entirely).

But I am not here to complain about the loss of farce and enclosed hallways, but to examine the long shadow The Odd Couple has cast over the romantic comedy genre (and it is a romantic comedy, rather than a buddy comedy) that seems hitherto to have gone unremarked-upon: the faked-orgasm deli scene from When Harry Met Sally, which is originated in almost whole cloth in The Odd Couple, twenty years earlier.

Jack Lemmon’s sinuses prefigure Meg Ryan’s orgasm, of course, and Walter Matthau reacts along the exact same beats as Billy Crystal. You can see for yourself:

Two New Yorkers enter a diner/deli and sit down for a meal. After a little conversation, the goyische ingenue (Lemmon/Ryan) shocks and horrifies her low-key, Jewish correspondent (Matthau/Crystal, who incidentally share a canonical onscreen love of Mallomars) with a spontaneous, unrehearsed eruption of private noise, eventually drawing the hostile attention of both the staff and other diners.

First comes the moment of Instigation (“What are you doing?”):

Open-mouthed ecstasy:

Then growing public censure/Stares of disapproval:

Outright horror from the staff:

A moment of total abandonment for Lemmon/Ryan and total demoralization for Matthau/Crystal:

A denouement of relief/pride/successful elimination on the one side (Lemmon/Ryan) and resignation/bottoming out/admission of powerlessness on the other (Matthau/Crystal):

That rare perfect scene that plays just as well in a heterosexual register as a homosocial one – let us thank Neil Simon, Nora Ephron, and the classic-eight Manhattan apartment floor plan for it.