COMEDY FIRST.(humor writing and acting)

The lives of many young comedy writers and directors are divided into two parts. There is childhood, ruled by bland Hollywood comedies such as "The Goodbye Girl" and "Oh God!" And then there is the glorious, unruly adolescence of the person they became after seeing a film that spoke to them in ways their parents didn't--a film that moved them to emulation. For Jay Roach, the director of the Austin Powers films, that movie was "Groundhog Day," in 1993. For Jake Kasdan, the director of "Orange County," it was "Stripes," in 1981, and, even more powerfully, "Ghostbusters," in 1984. For Adam Sandler, it was "Caddyshack," in 1980. And for Peter Farrelly, who directed "There's Something About Mary" with his brother Bobby, it was "Animal House," in 1978.

These comedies have several things in common. They attack the smugness of institutional life, trashing the fraternity system, country clubs, the Army--even local weathermen--with an impish good will that is unmistakably American. Will Rogers would have made films like these, if Will Rogers had lived through Vietnam and Watergate and decided that the only logical course of action was getting wasted or getting laid or--better--both. In "Caddyshack," the teen-aged caddy, Danny, asks his club's best golfer, Ty Webb (Chevy Chase), for advice about life. Webb frowns thoughtfully:

TY, Do you take drugs, Danny?, , DANNY, Every day., , TY, Good. So what's the problem?

Another thing these films have in common is that they were all directed and/or co-written by Harold Ramis. Ramis also acted in "Stripes" and "Ghostbusters" and directed the movies "Vacation" and "Analyze This." Anyone who saw these films as a teen-ager can probably still quote from one of Ramis's signature tongue-in-cheek pep talks, which resemble John F. Kennedy's "Ask Not" speech turned inside out. In "Stripes," for instance, 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."

Ramis was one of the first of the new generation of comic voices to come out of the Second City improv troupe in Chicago, which trained Murray, John Belushi, Chris Farley, and Mike Myers, among many others, in the sketch-driven style that has come to dominate modern comedy. "Sloppiness is a key part of improv," the screenwriter Dennis Klein told me. "And Harold brought that to Hollywood, rescuing comedies from their smooth, polite perfection." The secret of American commercial success is to hijack a subculture and ransom it to the mainstream. What Elvis did for rock and Eminem did for rap, Harold Ramis did for attitude: he mass-marketed the sixties to the seventies and eighties. He took his generation's anger and curiosity and laziness and woolly idealism and gave it a hyper-articulate voice. He wised it up.

"Animal House," which is set at Faber College in 1962, broke all box-office records for comedies, earning a hundred and forty-one million dollars. The film's humor was raunchy for its day: the oddballs of Delta House drink and loaf and chase girls, living a male adolescent's dream of college life. But what really engaged the audience was the antagonism between the frat and the dean. Dean Wormer, a sneaky and paranoid character, is clearly a Nixon figure, and by opposing him the Deltas came to seem like the moral equivalents of Daniel Ellsberg or John Lennon. They weren't, of course. After the Delta leaders, Otter and Boon, have destroyed their young fraternity brother's car on a road trip, Otter throws his arm around him and explains, "You fucked up. You trusted us." When Ramis was writing dialogue for Otter and Boon, whose irony and worldliness set them apart from the others, he had himself and a college friend in mind, and it's Otter (played by Tim Matheson) who delivers the requisite nonsense speech when the fraternity is hauled before the disciplinary council: "You can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few sick, perverted individuals. For, if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system? And, if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn't this . . . an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do what you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you bad-mouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!"

"Animal House" made wise-ass hedonism seem political; "Caddyshack" made it seem mandatory. When Judge Smails (Ted Knight), the Waspy leader of Bushwood Country Club, lectures the caddy about mending his ways, his sanctimony almost compels disobedience: "Danny, Danny, there's a lot of, well, badness in the world today. I see it in court every day--I've sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber. Didn't want to do it--I felt I owed it to them. The most important decision you can make right now is, What do you stand for, Danny: goodness, or badness?"