The latest in our ongoing series of writers remembering their go-to comfort picks is a tribute to Roberto Benigni’s Italian comedy farce
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’ve never been drawn to humour built on exaggerated mishaps. Roberto Benigni’s Italian comedy Johnny Stecchino is the exception. Yes, it’s farce, but it’s also sly social commentary, ridiculing the mafia without sanctifying its opposition, and playing with the gap between how things are and how they appear.
Six years before his Oscar-winning role in Life is Beautiful introduced him to a global audience, Benigni wrote, directed and starred in this 1991 box office hit that instantly became a national classic. Stecchino is Italian for toothpick, and mafia boss Johnny Stecchino always has one between his lips, a prop that defines his swaggering persona.
I first saw the comedy on TV a few months after moving to Sardinia in 2003. Struggling to follow the plot, I kept mixing up Dante, the naive, banana-munching bus driver, with his doppelganger Johnny – both played by Benigni – who others often mistake him for. His name is no accident: Dante, like Italy’s great poet guiding readers through the Divine Comedy. But this Dante stumbles through his own comic inferno with no map and no clue, surviving on oblivious charm. Even then, I recognised my own bewilderment in his incomprehension, and seeing it played for laughs made my confusion over cultural codes feel lighter.
