The act broke up after he got a job on the sitcom “One of the Boys,” with Mickey Rooney, a yet undiscovered Dana Carvey, and Meg Ryan in a recurring part. After the show flopped, Mr. Lane got his big Broadway break, with George C. Scott in a revival of Noël Coward’s “Present Laughter.” He played “an aspiring young provincial playwright fond of leaping onto couches and giggling loonily,” as Frank Rich put it in The New York Times, adding that he “alternately hits and overshoots his broad mark.”

Critics!

Mr. Lane spoke with nostalgia of an era when “there was sort of a friendlier vibe” between these creatures and playwrights, exemplified by the venerable Elliott Norton of Boston encouraging Neil Simon to add the Pigeon Sisters to the last act of “The Odd Couple.” And of the old days when a company could tinker with a show out of town, as Mr. Lane himself did with Mr. Simon and “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” before John and Jane Q. could record damning snippets and post them on the internet.

Mr. Lane, who also reprised the role of Oscar Madison with his co-star in “The Producers,” Matthew Broderick, has written the introduction to a forthcoming new edition of Mr. Simon’s memoirs. “His editor said, ‘You know, if you ever want to write your’ — ha, ha — ‘memoir,’” he said. “Well, no. I’m not doing that.”

His work as an author has been limited to his collaborations with his husband, Mr. Elliott, on a children’s book series, “Naughty Mabel,” about the insouciant French bulldog with whom they share an apartment in TriBeCa and a house in East Hampton, N.Y.

Perhaps disappointingly for those who relish Mr. Lane’s dexterity with a one-liner, there is no script of his own languishing in a drawer.

“I mean, I like making contributions, I’m a great punch-up man,” he said, twirling an imaginary cigar. “But it’s hard. They don’t like you to change job titles.” (As evinced, perhaps, by the cool reception he received for his version of Stephen Sondheim and Burt Shevelove’s adaptation of Aristophanes’s “The Frogs.”) “I would lean more toward directing. Everyone keeps saying I have to direct something because I’ve got a lot of opinions.”