Best Ever
Comedy?

Phil Connors wakes up at 6:00 AM to Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” on the clock radio. Again. The film never explains why. No mystical cause, no curse, no deal with the devil. He’s just stuck. The genius is that the setup doesn’t matter. What matters is what Phil does with it.

The first act is pure comedy—Murray doing what Murray does best, weaponizing sarcasm against a world he finds beneath him. He’s a Pittsburgh weatherman stuck covering Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, a town he openly despises, surrounded by people he considers rubes. When the loop starts, his response is exactly what you’d expect: confusion, denial, testing the boundaries, then gleeful exploitation. If nothing matters, why not rob banks? Why not seduce women with information he’s gathered across dozens of loops? Why not eat whatever you want, do whatever you want, because tomorrow never comes?

Then the film pivots. Phil tries to win Rita. He learns everything about her—her favorite drink, her toast preference, her college major, her secret passion for French poetry. He becomes exactly the man she’d want. And it doesn’t work. She can tell. She doesn’t know about the loop, but she knows something’s off. The performance is too perfect. It’s not real.

That’s when Phil breaks. He tries to kill himself. Toaster in the bathtub. Driving off a cliff with the groundhog. Stepping in front of a truck. The film plays this for laughs—how do you kill yourself when you wake up fine the next morning?—but underneath the comedy is despair. He’s trapped in a loop he can’t escape and can’t endure. Death isn’t an option. Change is the only option.

So he changes. Not to win Rita. That’s done. He’s tried that. He changes because there’s nothing else to do. He learns piano. Really learns it—years of practice condensed into montage. He learns ice sculpture. He memorizes the town, learns everyone’s problems, starts solving them. He catches a kid falling from a tree. He changes a tire for old ladies. He saves a choking man. He even tries to save the homeless man who dies every night, though he can’t. Some things are beyond fixing.

The film sneaks its philosophy in through comedy, but it’s drawing on real ideas—Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, Buddhist concepts of enlightenment through acceptance, the idea that meaning comes from engagement rather than escape. Phil stops trying to get out of the loop and starts living in it. And the moment he stops performing for Rita and just becomes the person he’s been becoming—that’s when the loop breaks.

Harold Ramis directs this with a light touch. There are no dramatic pronouncements, no speeches about the meaning of life. The philosophy emerges from repetition and variation—the same scenes played differently as Phil evolves. You feel the weight of time passing even though the film never tells you how long Phil’s been stuck. (Ramis said ten years. Others have calculated it as centuries based on his skill acquisition. It doesn’t matter. The point is: long enough to change.)

Murray makes it work because he never asks for sympathy. Early Phil is genuinely unpleasant—arrogant, dismissive, mean. You don’t root for him because he’s charming. You root for him because you watch him do the work. The montages aren’t shortcuts. They’re evidence. He’s putting in time. He’s learning humility the hardest way possible—by living the same day until he gets it right.

The ending is earned. Phil wakes up to “I Got You Babe” on February 3rd. The loop is broken. Rita is there. But the film doesn’t end with them together. It ends with Phil stepping outside into a world he’s learned to love. He’s free. But freedom isn’t the point. The point is that he’s ready for it.

Groundhog Day is a comedy about eternal recurrence that never says the words “eternal recurrence.” It’s a romance where the love story is secondary to the self-transformation. It’s a fantasy premise in service of something real—how change happens slowly, then all at once, when you stop resisting and start engaging. The loop breaks when Phil stops trying to break it. That’s not a trick. That’s the whole game.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Groundhog Day Collector’s Edition Blu-ray includes deleted scenes and a making-of documentary that covers the Ramis-Murray relationship (complicated) and the film’s unexpected resonance with religious groups, philosophers, and therapists.
• If the film’s philosophy hooks you, try Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic—same ideas about finding meaning through repetition and acceptance, different packaging.
• For Murray completists, the Ghostbusters/Groundhog Day Double Feature pairs his two most iconic high-concept comedies.