Comedy Italian Style
Film Art
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Comedy Italian Style
Comedy Italian Style derives its name from the film Divorce Italian Style and had a Golden Age from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. (The film titles confirm that collective imaginary idea that holds that everything is different, picturesque, and extravagant in Italy.)
The characteristic that these films have in common, which is probably the key to their success and the reason why they are still enjoyed and considered as decidedly moving films, is the combination of realism with humor, with a bit of satire that criticizes that reality.
When we talk about realism, we must be clear that Comedy Italian Style is a direct heir of Italian Neorealism.
Neorealism is one of the most influential cinematographic movements in history, born during the Second World War (early 1940s). It shows the real difficulties and human miseries that the protagonists, who are common people, experience without the glamour movies used to show.
After years of strong Neorealism (and although Italy was recovering economically, there was still a complicated social background), humor was successfully added to this cinema that showed society and its miseries.
Social criticism did not disappear: it moved from drama to satire (satire consists of using forms of irony and sarcasm to make a social criticism).
Comedy Italian Style depicts society and its customs with a certain tenderness; it treats picturesque daily life as something poetic and adorable, and at the same time, it allows the exaggeration of stereotypes (the perceptions and the collective ideas we have of how different human groups are and behave) in order to laugh at that life, its chaos, and its defects. In life, love operates mysteriously: one does not inevitably fall in love with perfection but often falls in love with adorable little defects. As we were saying, influenced by neorealism (where resources were scarce for economic reasons, but that scarcity was functional to show reality in a natural way, without artifice), comedies counted more on the creativity and talent of their directors and actors than on big budgets. And naturalism, combined with the theatricality (with some exaggeration) that comedy demands, created an infallible and really successful formula. In Italian-style comedy, we generally find the most underprivileged social strata, with humble workers who strive to get out of misery and with impeccable values and morals, although generally with little luck, and we also find an infinite number of rascals, crooks, thieves, racketeers, rogues, bums, and hustlers. And the great thing is that these scoundrels end up being charming.
Let us pay attention to an essential difference between Italian-style comedy and American screwball comedy (which was successful a couple of decades earlier and was a comedy cinema in times of economic crisis): In American comedy, the stories usually depict the upper class, living a luxurious and sophisticated life, which attracts the viewers as they are involved in an exquisite and unattainable world, although always with the optimistic message that the important thing in life is not money and that money does not provide happiness. Italian-style comedy generally depicts its stories in common, ordinary settings, where the protagonists are common, ordinary characters. Hence, its strong connection with the audience is through laughter. The audience, overwhelmed by reality, instead of escaping from reality by dreaming of impossible worlds, laughs at it. The comedy born of tragedy.
Image: Marcello Mastroianni in Divorce Italian Style (Pietro Germi, 1961)
Recommended links:
Charles Chaplin and his character Charlot.
The First Comedy Film of the History of Cinema.
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