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Groundhog Day was pretty clean. It may have to do with some puritanical feeling that comedy is a forbidden pleasure in a certain way. They make you laugh, and laughter is somehow an inferior emotion to tragedy.

Harold Ramis

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Harold Ramis
Age: 69 †
Born: 1944
Born: November 21
Died: 2014
Died: February 24
Actor
Comedian
Director
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Television Actor
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Harold Allen Ramis
Way
Emotion
Inferiors
Make
Comedy
Forbidden
Pretty
Somehow
Feeling
Tragedy
Pleasure
Laughter
Feelings
Laugh
Groundhog
Certain
Clean
Puritanical
May
Laughing
Inferior

More quotes by Harold Ramis

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Billy Crystal knows how to make people laugh. He's got 30 years on stage... there's no telling him what's funny.
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When I've written for Bill Murray - I've written six films for him - people would read it and say, Oh, that's so perfectly Bill. He'd read it and say, Are you kidding? I can't say these words. So it's all about perception.
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I think satire is a luxury of literate middle-class people. People who are well fed and relatively secure in their beds can laugh at their troubles. They can enjoy sitcoms. For those who aren't quite so lucky, well, the irony might be lost on them.
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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.
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Whenever a critic mentions the salary of an actor, I'm thinking, He's not talking about the movie.
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I try to measure the amount of truth in a work rather than just looking at the generic distinction between comedy and drama.
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If Chevy Chase had not been an actor, he might have been a very popular guy in advertising or whatever field he would have gone into, because of his charisma.
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I realized that my righteous indignation was a form of entertainment for me. I loved getting pissed off at injustice. I didn't do anything about it, I just liked the feeling of being pissed off.
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My characters aren't losers. They're rebels. They win by their refusal to play by everyone else's rules.
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It's like the old rule-if you introduce a gun into the first act of a play, it's going to be used in the third act. So if you do a movie about criminals, you have to accept there's going to be Some action.
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You can't not have feelings about country clubs, whichever side you're on.
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We tell our kids that policemen are good and God protects us and our country is noble, and at a certain point - and for some it comes quite early, five or six years old - we start to realize that it's all a facade.
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I loved writing and performing, but the idea of doing it for a living seemed so remote. But I eventually let it devolve to the point where it was the only thing I could do.
Harold Ramis
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As much as I liked acting for its playfulness and the reward of hearing big laughs wash over you on a stage, I always felt I should do something that I could control.
Harold Ramis
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Comedy is essentially made by young men, or older men with some form of arrested development, for young men or immature older men.
Harold Ramis
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There's a personal story of my own that I will write at some point, and it's a film that I will happily make. It could very well be the next thing I do, unless someone shows me something great.
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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.
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For me, most comedy scripts fail in the mechanical playing-out of the setup. They'll pay lip service to a moral lesson or a psychological progression.
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The cutting room is where you discover the optimal length of the movie.
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Most comedy is not very ambitious. You probably can't name more than a handful of comedies that would qualify for Best Picture.
Harold Ramis