Laughing is a Serious matter: Italian Style Comedy

In the wake of Italian Neorealism's failure to make a significant impact on the nation's cinema-going public a new strand of Italian film emerged that lasted from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s: Comedy - Italian Style. Picking up on elements of the post-war movement's social critique and combining them with comic techniques, a series of directors managed to satirize the Italy of the economic miracle in a genuinely popular form of cinema. Despite its success, both artistically and at the box office, Comedy - Italian Style is little known abroad and all too rarely studied. In this module we will look at the emergence of this genre, some of its key works, and compare and contrast the way in which different directors developed the unique features of the commedia. We will also study the historical conditions that gave rise to the popularity of this particular form of comedy and shaped its development.

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