Harold Ramis Quotes

Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.

I have always felt comedy and tragedy are roommates. If you look up comedy and tragedy, you will find a very old picture of two masks. One mask is tragedy. It looks like it's crying. The other mask is comedy. It looks like it's laughing. Nowadays, we would say, 'How tasteless and insensitive. A comedy mask is laughing at a tragedy mask.'

If you stretch tragedy, it will always become comedy.

Comedy is tragedy revisited.

It's great extremes which leads to great drama and great comedy.

I don't think it's a contradiction to find painfulness funny.

I've always said people say on a dramatic show, 'I was crying. It was so emotional when he went and grabbed that little girl from a burning building and handed her over to her mother.' In comedy, the best thing you can say is, 'I think it's funny.'

There's obviously a lot of tragedy in comedy; I really enjoy the paradox of what a really good comedy is.

Life is dramatic and comedic at times. Sometimes in the most dramatic situations, there is comedy. And good comedy comes from a sense of reality.

Even the most tragic moments can have moments of comedy.

Generally speaking, cancer - not that funny of a thing. When you hear about it, you don't go, 'Oh, hilarious!'... But within that - comedy, tragedy, hand-in-hand.

I happen to like things that are funny and dramatic at the same time. I don't see the difference.

I feel like with comedy, the crazy things that happen are never serious you know? Like, rubble being poured onto you in drama would be something that's absolutely terrible, but in a comedy it's absolutely terrible but so funny.

I actually feel that all drama has an element of comedy in it. A great deal of that I learned from writers like Chekhov who called his plays his comedy even when they touch on tragedy.

I naturally think in terms of comedy whenever I see anything because tragedy is so close to comedy, so I like to add the tragedy to the comedy or a little bit of comedy to the tragedy in order to make them both feel more real to me.

You can't have good comedy without drama in it.

I think that you can make a drama and have it be intensely funny, and vice versa.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

When you see things upside down, the ego can be extraordinarily funny; it's absurd. But it's tragic at the same time.

I think you figure out how to be funny by necessity. It's not a natural thing, being funny in the face of tragedy is kind of demented.

There's comedy even in tragedy. There's comedy in life. And in 'Castle', we go for that comedy.

Sometimes in the most tragic situation, something just profoundly funny happens.

I never understand when people say, 'Do you do comedy or tragedy?' I don't think they're very much different. They both have to be true, and there isn't a great play in the world that doesn't have funny parts to it - as 'Salesman' does, as 'King Lear' does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means surely you have to have both.

Life can be dramatic and funny all in the same day.