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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.

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
Service
Setups
Lessons
Progression
Failing
Mechanical
Pay
Lesson
Playing
Psychological
Comedy
Scripts
Moral
Lips
Fail
Setup

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First and foremost, you have to make the movie for yourself. And that's not to say, to hell with everyone else, but what else have you got to go on but your own taste and judgment?
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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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Analyze This is a good movie because Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal are really good. But without the material to put on the play, of course, they couldn't be good. For me, it starts with the writing.
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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.
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I have no trouble selling out—I’m a benevolent hack, in a certain way—but I want to pander for something I believe in.
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Most people live somewhere on the spectrum of anxiety and depression.
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Some people have a fear of rejecting all the security that comes with family, church and state. They become fundamentalists.
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I used to be married to a woman who pursued every spiritual trend with tremendous passion and dragged me along. I don't believe in anything. I'd seen mediums and readers.
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Just expressing contempt for your leaders doesn't really accomplish anything.
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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.
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You can't not have feelings about country clubs, whichever side you're on.
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Life doesn't care about your vision. You just gotta roll with it.
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Never hit anyone in anger, unless you're absolutely sure you can get away with it.
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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.
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I was the little guy who knew how to tie a necktie. It came from having absentee parents. They were tremendously loving and caring people who, by circumstance, had to go to work.
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No one will laugh at how great things are for somebody.
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When you're young and you first see the extent and depth of the world's hypocrisy, it's fun to go after it. But by the time you're sixty, it's so commonplace. What's the point in ridiculing people anymore? Their existence itself is a sort of sick joke.
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You can perceive life as tragic, or you can laugh at the tragedy of it and that turns it into comedy. It doesn't change the circumstances.
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I'd rather do comedies that strike at some bigger ideas.
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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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