Because comedy means you're not sitting at the grown-ups' table, as Woody Allen famously said, Harold Ramis won't rate a fraction of the attention Steven Spielberg is likely to get from posterity. But if you came of age in the 1980s, odds are that Caddyshack, National Lampoon's Vacation and _Ghostbusters _were every bit as formative for you as _E.T. _Ramis's _Groundhog Day _was released the same year as _Schindler's List, _which won seven Oscars compared to Groundhog Day's zip. Without comparing apples and oranges, does anyone dispute which movie means more to us 20-odd years later?
Even if he'd never done anything else, Ramis would deserve to be legendary just for the three years (1976 to '79) he spent as the head writer for and sometime performer on _SCTV, _the greatest sketch-comedy series since Sid Caesar's _Your Show of Shows _and one whose wit and indelible gallery of delusional, scheming buffoons have never been equaled since. But it was the script he, Doug Kenney and Chris Miller cooked up for a silly-ass yukfest derived from Miller's frat-house days at Dartmouth that altered the pop-culture landscape for real. You don't have to love 1978's _Animal House—_and sorry, I don't—to recognize what a landmark it is: the founding movie of a whole generation (or two) of rude, boisterously R-rated screen comedy. Without Harold Ramis, no Judd Apatow.
After co-writing _Meatballs _for Ivan Reitman, Ramis turned director himself with _Caddyshack—_the second of the six movies that teamed him, in one capacity or another, with Bill Murray, the signature comedy actor of the '80s. Moviegoers who only know the latter-day Murray—that is, the one whose ever more minimalist Zen melancholy incarnates Wes Anderson's philosophical side—may find it hard to credit just what an insolent screen presence he was in Reitman's Ramis-scripted _Stripes _and _Ghostbusters. _How much Ramis did to help shape that persona and how much he and/or Reitman simply trusted Murray to run with it is anyone's guess, but their collaboration was as productive, in its way, as Martin Scorsese's with Robert de Niro.
For that matter, Ramis's first movie with de Niro himself—1999's _Analyze This—_effectively launched the actor on a whole second career in comedy, and never mind what you think of the results. The point is that he was there at the creation more often than people may realize. He oversaw not only Chevy Chase's metamorphosis from snotty _SNL _quipster to family-friendly Everyman, thanks to launching the _Vacation _franchise, but the cusp movie of Murray's career: _Groundhog Day, _of course. That's where the transformation got underway of the ostensibly callous, appealingly indifferent Bill we once knew into the sadder-but-wiser master of subtlety he's now renowned for being, and all Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola (as in Lost in Translation) had to do down the road was amplify what Ramis had found lurking in him.
For better or worse, the movies Ramis worked on were also a virtual seismograph of cultural shifts. Animal House may have been set in the '60s, but when cries of "To-ga!" swept campuses that had been hotbeds of political unrest just a few years earlier, even the most diehard countercultural types knew that "the Sixties" were officially over. In 1981, _Stripes _was the first service comedy to both put Vietnam behind us and re-valorize the Cold War. Language and sexual friskiness aside, the movie could have been made in the 1950s; the war between Warren Oates's lifer sergeant and Murray's proudly feckless private is just _Beetle Bailey's _Sarge and Beetle all over again, albeit much funnier in this incarnation. _Ghostbusters _came out the year of Reagan's re-election, and its ebullience was the hipster mirror of the Great Communicator's own. I happened to be living in Washington, D.C., back then, and I still remember losing count of how many Beltway up-and-comers were strutting Georgetown's streets in Ghostbusters togs that Halloween.
That's a compliment to Ramis's gift for anticipating the national mood, mind you, not a dig at a presumably nonexistent ideological agenda. After all, he was a product of the counterculture, at least in part, and the only "political" thread running through his movies is a cheerful disrespect for authority. He was just too amiable a writer and director for his jabs to draw much blood. _Groundhog Day _aside, the movie that most brought out his sweet-tempered streak was 1995's _Stuart Saves His Family, starring Al Franken as moronically but winningly optimistic self-help guru Stuart Smalley. _It was also the worst box-office flop Ramis had been associated with in a career dominated by huge commercial hits, and—despite the success of _Analyze This _four years later—he never fully recovered his momentum or his affinity for ye olde Zeitgeist.
Partly as a result, he never got to sit at the grownups' table. But that doesn't mean he wasn't interested in trying. At one point, he was set to direct a screen adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's _A Confederacy of Dunces—_a comedy, sure, but one with the kind of big-league literary pedigree that often brings Oscar and otherwise haughty critics running. More fascinatingly, he also wanted to make a movie about left-wing firebrand Emma Goldman—and had hoped to lure Bette Midler to star in it. It's enough to make you wonder if the Ramis movies we've got barely scratched the surface, and so what if his Goldman biopic would have gotten green-lit when hell froze over? A man who could even think up the concept of Midler as Emma Goldman is definitely a man who got taken from us too soon.