THE BELIEVER: You had that great line in your New Yorker profile, “Sometimes what people perceive as my smile is a grimace of pain.”

HAROLD RAMIS: That about sums it up. But part of my smile is also about how absurd it all is. I think I got in touch with that absurdity quite young. Sometimes it’s hysterical irony and sometimes it’s a painful irony. Life has all of these contradictory feelings and contradictory results. People spend their whole lives struggling to get what they think they want, and even if they get it, they find that it’s either not what they wanted, or it comes with so many unwanted consequences. We’re always shut off from pure joy. 

RIP Harold Ramis. http://the.blvr.org/Nuwq3s