As Chevy Chase might have put it on “Saturday Night Live,” Harold Ramis is still dead. And with him has gone the finest era of comedy: The ’70s kind.

Ramis was as close to the king of comedy as it gets, as a writer, director and occasional sidekick for “Animal House,” “Meatballs,” “Caddyshack,” “Stripes,” “Ghostbusters,” “Back to School,” “National Lampoon’s Vacation” and “Groundhog Day.”

Now Ramis, like his fellow counterculturalists John Belushi, Doug Kenney (co-writer of “Animal House” and “Caddyshack”), Richard Pryor and George Carlin, is gone. Chase just turned 70. David Letterman is 66 and Bill Murray, 63, has pretty much given up comedy, unless you count unintentionally funny projects like “Hyde Park on Hudson.”

Taking off with the movie “M*A*S*H” in 1970 — a huge hit that grossed $450 million in today’s dollars — and its spinoff sitcom, ’70s comedy ruled from an anti-throne of contempt for authority in all shapes. College deans, student body presidents, Army sergeants and officers, country-club swells, snooty professors and the EPA: Anyone who made it his life’s work to lord it over others got taken down with wit.

When the smoke bombs cleared and the anarchy died, comedy turned inward and became domesticated. It also became smaller.

“The Cosby Show” and Jerry Seinfeld didn’t seek to ridicule those in power. Instead they gave us comfy couch comedy — riffs on family and etiquette and people’s odd little habits.

Now, in the Judd Apatow era, comedy is increasingly marked by two worrying trends: One is a knee-jerk belief, held even by many of the most brilliant comedy writers, that coming up with the biggest, most outlandish gross-out gags is their highest calling.

It was Apatow who made Kristen Wiig put the diarrhea scene in “Bridesmaids” because, after “American Pie” and “There’s Something About Mary,” comedy’s highest aspiration is to go below the waist.

Would-be Apatovian movies like “That Awkward Moment,” which came from a comedy writer considered (at least at the moment) hot in the industry, veer awkwardly from bedroom to bathroom, frantically throwing in scene after scene of dudes standing around staring at each other’s junk or talking about which one of them just pooped.

“Caddyshack” and “Animal House,” considered crude at the time, are about as far from “That Awkward Moment” as they are from Noël Coward.

The other worrying trend today is self-centeredness: Get more and more personal. Put a microscope on that belly button! We really want to know about the quantity, color and consistency of the lint you discover there.

Ramis, Chase and Murray would never have dreamt of doing a thinly disguised autobiography like “This Is 40.” They would have asked a) Who cares about my boring, well-heeled existence? and b) If I weren’t me, wouldn’t I hate me? These questions never occurred to Apatow because comedy today is therapy. Why storm the barricades? It’s easier to flip the channels.

Ramis and his contemporaries invented the comedy version of the ’70s dramatic anti-hero — the Dustin Hoffman/Jack Nicholson/Steve McQueen type.

In the dramas, the hero was invariably crushed by the system, but in the comedies, the underdogs rose up, kicked out the stuffed shirts (Sgt. Hulka in “Stripes,” Judge Smails in “Caddyshack,” Greg Marmalard and Dean Wormer in “Animal House,” Peck in “Ghostbusters”) and seized power while remaining cool at all times.

Crucially, they were too cool to wield power, because power isn’t cool. Nor is earnestness: The most embarrassing faux pas of any of the Ramis anti-heroes would have been to make a straightforward, unironic, sincere defense of anything. (Only in romantic moments do the boys let up with the quips, and then only for a moment.)

Consider Murray’s hilarious defense redefining diffident post-Vietnam, post-Jimmy Carter, pre-Rambo America as Underdog Nation in his loopy inspirational speech in “Stripes”:

“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: His nose is cold! But there’s no animal that’s more faithful, that’s more loyal, more lovable than the mutt. Who saw ‘Old Yeller’? Who cried when Old Yeller got shot at the end? [Sarcastically] Nobody cried when Old Yeller got shot? I’m sure. I cried my eyes out.

“So we’re all dogfaces, we’re all very, very different, but there is one thing that we all have in common: We were all stupid enough to enlist in the Army. We’re mutants. There’s something wrong with us, something very, very wrong with us. Something seriously wrong with us — we’re soldiers. But we’re American soldiers! We’ve been kicking ass for 200 years! We’re 10 and 1!”

Ramis, like most other ’70s comics, was a committed lefty and described “Animal House” as a story about the last days of possibility before the Kennedy assassination. That “10 and 1” line was, he said, his way of sneaking in a jibe about Vietnam, which he bitterly opposed.

For Ramis’ generation, politics was chiefly defined as hating Lyndon Johnson (Vietnam’s father) and, later, Richard Nixon. In those terms, liberals have a lot of company on the right, which adores Ramis and the other ’70s comics as much as lefties do.

Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie calls “Ghostbusters” “the most libertarian movie ever,” and Reason colleague Jesse Walker notes, “William Atherton’s EPA agent fills the space in ‘Ghostbusters’ that John Vernon’s dean does in ‘Animal House’ and Ted Knight’s old-money country-club man does in ‘Caddyshack’ . . . There isn’t even that big a shift in the targets. In the ’70s, activists on the left as well as the right regularly took aim at the regulatory state.”

Critically, generation Ramis wasn’t making an affirmative case for the left. Ramis-ites didn’t say our guys would run things better than their guys. They disdained the concept of leadership. They thought no one should be running things. The Ramis vision is of a bottom-up, leaderless society with central power structures crushed and humiliated. It’s a hippie vision, sure. And it’s pure Tea Party.

Full props must be given to President Obama for becoming (I believe) the first sitting president to quote Carl the Gardener of “Caddyshack,” in a surprise statement on Ramis’ passing: “Our thoughts and prayers are with Harold’s wife, Erica, his children and grandchildren, and all those who loved him, who quote his work with abandon, and who hope that he received total consciousness.”

Still, Obama is exactly the kind of stuffed-shirt know-it-all — pompous, humorless and in love with himself — that Ramis mercilessly lampooned. To my knowledge, Obama has never spontaneously said anything funny. But he does say alarming things like, “We’re gonna punish our enemies,” and goes on amazing adventures in self-aggrandizement.

Personality-wise, Obama is just Nixon with a shiny Harvard veneer. Somewhere, a new Obama-era EPA bureaucrat is frustrating some small businessman like Peter Venkman, except in real life, the Venkmans have no chance against the gooey green blob of authority that slimes all of us.

In his Ramis statement, Obama said, “When we watched his movies — from ‘Animal House’ and ‘Caddyshack’ to ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Groundhog Day’ — we didn’t just laugh until it hurt. We questioned authority. We identified with the outsider. We rooted for the underdog.”

But Obama grabs more and more authority for himself and his coterie. His style is all-controlling, even to the point of sending his wife out to tell kids not to drink soda. Obama doesn’t object to the existence of a rulebook. He just wants to be the one writing it. The slogan on the “Animal House” poster: “It was the Deltas against the rules. The rules lost.”

Seventies comedy had a revolutionary undertone. It had a purpose. It had substance. It not only made you laugh, it put the world to rights. It was a snowball with a rock inside it.

How does the massive group diarrhea of “Bridesmaids” do that? What does pie-bonking tell us about society?

Today’s comics have abdicated their responsibility to take down the powerful. They tiptoe around President Obama, but comedy has to be fearless.

These days, they’re more at ease mocking their social inferiors than going after the high and mighty. Comfortably ensconced inside the castle that Richard Pryor and George Carlin tried to burn down, they drop water balloons on the unspeakable middle-America drones of “Parks and Recreation” and “The Office.”

There’s a joke from “The Office” that’s typical of the contempt. Andy says, “I went to a little school called Cornell — ever heard of it?” It’s not a takedown from below but a sneer from above, in tune with Dwight Schrute’s pathetic insistence on his title of “assistant regional manager” when he’s merely “assistant to the regional manager,” and anyway, anyone with “regional manager” in his title is a nobody by definition.

Cornell, to comedy elites and graduates of the 15 schools that outrank it, is a near-mediocre brand so lame that only a dope would brag about it. (First-tier Ivy Leaguers, when their teams are losing to Cornell at the end of football games, break out the cruel cheer, “That’s all right, that’s OK, Cornell’s not a real Ivy League school anyway!”) “The Office’s” first and second showrunners, Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, both went to Harvard, as did writer-actor B.J. Novak. Their colleague Mindy Kaling went to Dartmouth (which also unclogs its nose at the likes of Cornell).

Ramis’ death is a reminder that comedy has gotten too fat and happy, too rich and insulated, too therapeutic and self-adoring, too willing to mistake the meaninglessly crude for the spectacularly subversive.

Even comics who present themselves as the loyal opposition to the political leadership, like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, expend most of their efforts simply repackaging Democratic Party talking points as jokes. The ’70s hang-’em-all anarchist spirit lives on only in the margins, in a few brave outposts like “South Park.”

It’s as if today’s comedy writers are sitting respectfully, stars in their eyes, as their beloved president sits amongst them like Charming Guy with Guitar in “Animal House,” gently strumming away and singing, “I gave my love a cherry.” If some free-ranging Blutarskyite came up and smashed the guitar, they’d stand up — and pound the rebel for interrupting such a beautiful, magical moment.

Then they’d go back to cracking jokes about those pathetic losers destined for unspeakable middle-management manufacturing jobs because they only managed to get into Cornell.