Harold Ramis, a writer, director and actor whose sly but boisterous silliness helped catapult comedies such as Groundhog Day, Ghostbusters, Animal House and Caddyshack to commercial and critical success, died Monday in his Chicago-area home. He was 69.
Chris Day, a spokesman for Ramis’ talent agency, said the cause was complications of autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, a disease of the blood vessels.
Ramis was a master at creating hilarious scenes and plotlines with indelible characters, among them a groundskeeper obsessed with a gopher, fraternity brothers at war with a college dean and a jaded weatherman condemned to repeating Groundhog Day over and over.
In Stripes, a 1981 film about military life written by Ramis with Dan Goldberg and Len Blum, Bill Murray exhorts his fellow soldiers by yelling: “We’re not Watusi! We’re not Spartans - we’re Americans! That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts. Here’s proof.”
He touches a soldier’s face. “His nose is cold,” Murray says.
In 2004, screenwriter Dennis Klein told The New Yorker that Ramis rescued comedies from “their smooth, polite perfection” by offering a new, rough-hewn originality. He compared Ramis’ effect on comedy with that of Elvis Presley on rock and Eminem on rap.
“More than anyone else,” Paul Weingarten wrote in The Chicago Tribune Magazine in 1983, “Harold Ramis has shaped this generation’s ideas of what is funny.”
Ramis collaborated with the people who are considered the royalty of comedy in the 1970s and ’80s, notably from the first-generation cast of Saturday Night Live, including John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner.
He was born in Chicago on Nov. 21, 1944, and attended Washington University in St. Louis on a National Merit Scholarship. He graduated with a degree in English literature before going to work as an orderly in a mental hospital, a substitute teacher in inner-city Chicago and the jokes editor at Playboy.
He got his start in comedy in 1969 at Chicago’s famed Second City improvisational theater troupe, an incubator for many Saturday Night Live performers, including Belushi, Murray and Aykroyd.
Belushi went on to star in Animal House (1978), which Ramis helped write. Murray and Aykroyd starred alongside Ramis in Ghostbusters, which he also helped write. And Murray starred in Groundhog Day (1993) and Caddyshack (1980) - both directed by Ramis - and Meatballs (1979), which was written by Ramis, Blum, Goldberg and Janis Allen.
Among Ramis’ projects in later years was Analyze This (1999), a comedy he directed and wrote in collaboration, starring Billy Crystal as a psychiatrist and Robert DeNiro as his mobster patient.
Ramis is survived by his wife, Erica; his sons Julian and Daniel; his daughter, Violet; and two grandchildren.
Aykroyd issued a statement Monday calling Ramis “my brilliant, gifted, funny friend,” adding, “May he now get the answers he was always seeking.”
Front Section, Pages 2 on 02/25/2014