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November 01, 2005
Harold Ramis: the top of your intelligence
Harold Ramis talks smart comedy with NATO's house mag's M. E. Russell, who asks the Ice Harvest director to define Second City's Bernie Sahlins' famous directive, "Work from the top of your intelligence.""It means a couple of things. One is level of reference—any character can know anything. I believe that using real information is a good thing, even in a comedy; it has the possibility of educating the audience. All that elevated technical talk in Ghostbusters? Some of it has origins in real history or science....
"Working from the top of your intelligence” also means raising your aspirational level. If you’re gonna communicate with an audience, why not try to impart a sophisticated worldview or a sophisticated view of human behavior—the most intelligent view you can come up with? If you take any idea, even if it’s generic, there’s no point in aiming it at 12-year-olds. Working from the top of your intelligence kind of assumes that even a 12-year-old is smarter than you’re giving him credit for. So that’s sort of what it means to me: aspiration and reference."
Posted by pride at November 1, 2005 11:54 AM
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