The Enduring Laughs—and Life—of Harold Ramis

My late husband Roger Ebert noted potential in Harold Ramis from the moment he awarded four stars to the first film that the "SCTV" star co-wrote, 1978's hit comedy, "National Lampoon's Animal House." "The movie is vulgar, raunchy, ribald, and occasionally scatological," wrote Roger. "It is also the funniest comedy since Mel Brooks made 'The Producers' (1968). 'Animal House' is funny for some of the same reasons the National Lampoon is funny (and Second City and 'Saturday Night Live' are funny): Because it finds some kind of precarious balance between insanity and accuracy, between cheerfully wretched excess and an ability to reproduce the most revealing nuances of human behavior." 

Ramis immediately went on to co-author other landmark comedies including 1980's "Caddyshack" (which marked his directorial debut) and Ivan Reitman's 1981 army satire, "Stripes," in which Ramis starred opposite Bill Murray. Of the latter film, Roger wrote, "For Harold Ramis, who plays Murray's grave-eyed, flat-voiced, terminally detached partner in 'Stripes,' this is a chance, at last, to come out from behind the camera. Ramis and Murray are both former Second City actors, but in Hollywood, Ramis has been typecast as a writer, maybe because he sometimes looks too goofy for Hollywood's unimaginative tastes. In 'Stripes,' Murray and Ramis make a wonderful team. Their big strength is restraint. Given the tendency of movies like this to degenerate into undisciplined slapstick, they wisely choose to play their characters as understated, laid-back anarchists. Murray enlists in the Army in a what-the-hell mood after his girlfriend throws him out, and Ramis enlists because one stupid gesture deserves another."

Three years later, actor Murray and actor/co-writer Ramis re-teamed with director Reitman for the biggest hit of their respective careers, 1984's "Ghostbusters," a horror comedy praised by Roger as "a head-on collision between two comic approaches that have rarely worked together very successfully. This time, they do. It's (1) a special-effects blockbuster, and (2) a sly dialogue movie, in which everybody talks to each other like smart graduate students who are in on the joke. [...] No matter what effects are being used, they're placed at the service of the actors; instead of feeling as if the characters have been carefully posed in front of special effects, we feel they're winging this adventure as they go along."

Yet it was Ramis' 1993 directorial effort, "Groundhog Day," which cast Bill Murray as a grouchy weatherman who finds himself stuck in a time loop, that gave the filmmaker the best reviews of his career. Though Roger initially awarded it an affectionate three stars, he later inducted the film into his Great Movies series in 2005, writing, "Certainly I underrated it in my original review; I enjoyed it so easily that I was seduced into cheerful moderation. But there are a few films, and this is one of them, that burrow into our memories and become reference points. When you find yourself needing the phrase This is like 'Groundhog Day' to explain how you feel, a movie has accomplished something."

Roger enjoyed other directorial efforts by Ramis including 1995's "Stuart Saves His Family," a vehicle for Al Franken's titular "Saturday Night Live" character, which the critic hailed as "a genuine surprise: A movie as funny as the 'SNL' stuff, and yet with convincing characters, a compelling story and a sunny, sweet sincerity shining down on the humor." Roger also favored Ramis' 1999 mob comedy, "Analyze This," which teamed Robert De Niro with Billy Crystal. He wrote that Ramis "is presented with all sorts of temptations, I suppose, to overplay the De Niro character and turn the movie into an 'Airplane!''-type satire of gangster movies. I think he finds the right path--allowing satire, referring to De Niro's screen past, and yet keeping the focus on the strange friendship between two men who speak entirely different languages." Of Ramis' somewhat more straight-faced 2005 crime film, "The Ice Harvest," Roger wrote, "it finds a balance between the goofy and the gruesome, as in a rather brilliant scene in which a mobster who is locked inside a trunk is nevertheless optimistic enough to shout out muffled death threats."

When Ramis passed away on February 24th, 2014, from autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, our frequent contributor Peter Sobczynski penned a heartfelt tribute, writing, "What made the news of Ramis' death such a gut-punch, at least from my own personal perspective, was that it meant the loss of not just a great filmmaker but a great Chicagoan as well. After spending time in Hollywood, he moved back to the city with his family. He was a familiar and friendly face on the local entertainment scene who always seemed willing to lend a hand when needed. Over the years, I had the privilege of talking to him several times. He was never anything less than warm, gracious, self-effacing, intelligent, and seemingly without a bone to pick with anyone."

The following year, I invited the late director's widow, Erica Mann Ramis, and "Groundhog Day" producer Trevor Albert to Ebertfest for a special Q&A and screening of clips that honored the comedy icon's life and career. In my open letter penned to Roger, who passed away in 2013, I wrote, "Displayed at Harold's funeral was a violin that he had made by hand and taught himself to play. It was on a table. But Harold had to first teach himself to build the table in order to have a surface on which to construct the violin. That's the kind of man Harold was. [...] One of the last conversations you and Harold had was about the transcendent nature of Charlie Kaufman's movie 'Synecdoche, New York.' You both saw a higher meaning in every frame."