Italian Comedy, could its contents provide an interpretation for the spirit and custom of other places, we wonder, given the strong typicality of the characters and of the actors, the directors, the contexts which made it? This is, of course, a rhetorical question, since the history of culture and cinema in the last 40 years has clearly demonstrated that our good old ‘comedy’, that kind of theatre in the cinema - that’s how I like to think of it - has attracted audiences from all over the world.
Mario Monicelli, in an interview with Francesca Arceri entitled ‘The Bitter Smile of the Italian Comedy’, states: "[...] Yes, because in fact [audiences] laugh. Not just in Italy. The French laugh, the Americans, the Chinese. The Chinese love Italian Comedy, they even dub it. You should hear Toto’ speaking Chinese! It is universal, because the feelings are the same, they do not change neither through centuries nor through countries.”
That special quality of making people smile, or even laugh intensely, on dramatic themes referring to the struggle of life in the city jungle of a civilisation that has the courage of showing its fragile and vulnerable side and doesn’t have cultural borders. This leaves the conscience suspended and has turned these films into rural and city poems, unhinging for a while the rigid boundaries between good and evil, ugly and beautiful. This is the quality of a humanity and creativity able to use irony in the attempt of debunking the anatomy of man, so as to return him to the affection of the community, whether it be the family, the social group, the gang, the street. A lesson of high-quality art, which can be certainly used in cinema therapy for these very reasons and which offers a wide range of situations and themes.
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