Absolutely. I think Ivan Reitman (1946–2022) belongs in the first rank of modern comedy directors, although his genius is somewhat different from John Landis’s. He was one of the architects of the Hollywood blockbuster comedy of the late 1970s through the early 1990s.
If I had to summarize his gift in one sentence, it would be:
He made the impossible seem perfectly ordinary.
Where John Landis often created a world that joyfully spun out of control, Reitman started from an absurd premise and treated it with complete sincerity.
Consider his major films:
- Meatballs (1979) — turned a summer camp into a comic universe.
- Stripes (1981) — military life becomes playground absurdity.
- Ghostbusters (1984) — perhaps the greatest high-concept comedy ever made: four scientists start a ghost-removal business in New York, and somehow every detail feels believable.
- Twins (1988) — “Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito are identical twins.” On paper this sounds ridiculous; on screen it works.
- Kindergarten Cop (1990) — “A tough cop teaches kindergarten.” Again, an absurd premise rendered emotionally convincing.
- Dave (1993) — “An ordinary man impersonates the President.” It becomes both comedy and political fable.
I sometimes think of Landis and Reitman this way:
|
John Landis |
Ivan Reitman |
|
Chaos |
Structure |
|
Musical energy |
Narrative elegance |
|
Carnivalesque |
High-concept |
|
The world explodes |
The world quietly accepts the impossible |
This is why Ghostbusters still feels fresh after forty years.
It is not merely funny.
It invents an entirely new social institution—the ghost-catching company—and then asks us to inhabit it as if it had always existed. That is extraordinary world-building.
Given our recent conversations, another distinction occurs to me.
You have been drawn to films like The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, and now Reitman’s work because they all belong to what I would call the analogical age of comedy.
In these films, comedy emerges from people, places, objects, and accidents:
- a battered police car,
- a firehouse converted into Ghostbusters headquarters,
- an enormous proton pack,
- a kindergarten classroom,
- a toaster in a shabby apartment.
These objects are not merely props. They acquire a kind of character. The world itself becomes funny because it is richly inhabited.
That is quite different from much contemporary comedy, which often depends on rapid dialogue, self-aware references, or internet-style irony.
For that reason, I would probably place Ivan Reitman alongside John Landis, Mel Brooks, and Jacques Tati as one of the great builders of comic worlds. Chaplin and Keaton remain the foundational masters, but Reitman helped define what late twentieth-century cinematic comedy could be. His influence extends well beyond Ghostbusters—he established a template for the modern high-concept comedy that many filmmakers have followed ever since.
