Harold Ramis Quotes

The comic impulse is sometimes a reaction to sadness. You feel like you can make one choice or the other.

My job is to come up with something that you like and you agree with that you would play wholeheartedly. If we disagree, I may not be doing my job correctly.

Somebody once told me that if you laugh at a George Bush joke, or you send an email cartoon to your friends that makes Bush look like a fool, you feel like you've done something significant. But really, what have you actually done? Just expressing contempt for your leaders doesn't really accomplish anything.

I've always thought that comedy was just another dramatic expression.

How one handles success or failure is determined by their early childhood.

Stand-up is every man for himself; you learn from hanging out at these clubs and watching other guys, and then trying not to be like them.

Everyone has experienced laughing at a funeral, and not even inappropriately. It could be a response to a moment of absurdity or some fond memory. We're human beings so we understand that laughter and crying aren't always disparate emotions.

That's one of the great things about DVD: In addition to reaching people who didn't catch the movie in theaters, you get to have this interaction of sorts.

I did a comedy with Al Franken about his character Stuart Smalley, which was really about alcoholism and addiction and codependency. It had some painful stuff in it. When we showed it to focus groups, some of them actually said, "If I want to see a dysfunctional family, I'll stay home."

I've got to find a compromise where I don't feel compromised. I've got to find something equally good that they don't feel uncomfortable with. At a certain point, it's no longer about what I thought was right, but it's about this new discovery that happens with the actors. It's nice when the actor is also a writer.

I've tried to stay away from mild satire. I want an audience to feel something more powerful for their ten bucks. If they're going to spend two hours with me, and trust me to lead them around, I'd like to take them someplace special.

We all wish we could be in more than one place at the same time. People with families feel guilty all the time-if we spend too much time with our family, we feel we're not working hard enough.

Well, for me, it's the relationship between comedy and life - that's the edge I live on, and maybe it's my protection against looking at the tragedy of it all. It's seeing life in balance. Comedy and tragedy co-exist. You can't have one without the other. I'm of the school that anything can be funny, if seen from a comedic point of view.

Films are big hits when they touch a lot of people. Things are not funny in a vacuum, they're funny because we respond to some personal dislocation, some embarrassment, some humiliation, some pain we've suffered, or some desire we have.

When someone's an actor and you're an actor, you meet them and you feel like you know them. We're in the same business, and we all speak the same comedy language.

My characters aren't losers. They're rebels. They win by their refusal to play by everyone else's rules.

Comedy is essentially made by young men, or older men with some form of arrested development, for young men or immature older men.

Life has all of these contradictory feelings and contradictory results. People spend their whole lives struggling to get what they think they want, and even if they get it, they find that it's either not what they wanted, or it comes with so many unwanted consequences. We're always shut off from pure joy.

Whatever bliss we think we're going to find, we may find it in brief flashes, fleeting moments that come and go. There's an impossibility to nailing down any good feeling.

Most people live somewhere on the spectrum of anxiety and depression.