A Dozen Italian Comedies That Are Seriously Funny

Twelve seriously funny Italian comedies, from Alberto Sordi to Checco Zalone. Classic films Italians actually quote, with notes about what gets lost in the subtitles.

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You’re having dinner with Italian friends. One of those that lasts three hours. You’re proud of your ability to understand most of what’s being said. You participate. You’ve studied and obtained your B1 certificate. You earned this.

Then somebody says “un fiorino!” and everybody bursts into laughter. You smile to fit in, but you have no idea what just happened. “Why is it funny?” you think, but don’t dare voice. Your B1 level allows you to understand the word, but it doesn’t make sense in context.

That gap is the real citizenship language exam. Italy may test your imperfetto at the consulate, but whether you belong is tested at the dinner table. And the dinner exam is written in cultural references that largely originate in Italian comedies.

So here are a dozen seriously funny Italian comedies. Not necessarily the best twelve comedies according to critics. Films that have achieved cult status in Italy. Largely, the ones that are still quoted at dinner.

I’m presenting your dinner-table survival kit in chronological order, mostly to avoid the fights that would ensue from trying to rank them.

1. Un americano a Roma (1954)

Italians romanticize America. Americans romanticize Italy. It’s not a new trend that emerged on TikTok this decade. Un americano a Roma (An American in Rome) is a comedy that opens on the premise that Europeans dream of going to America, while Americans dream of Rome.

Nando Moriconi (played by the legendary Alberto Sordi) is a young man from Trastevere who worships America. Not quite the real America, the one in his mind. So he walks like a sheriff, speaks English like a cowboy, or what he thinks a cowboy sounds like, and eats what he believes is American food.

Alberto Sordi spent his half-century-long career playing the average Italian, with self-irony and honest candor. This is the comedy that crystallized and consecrated his act.

The most quotable scene, likely one of the most famous in all of Italian cinema, takes place at a table. Nando rejects his mother’s spaghetti because he wants to eat like an American. So he attempts to eat bread with yogurt, jam, and mustard washed down with milk, because in his mind, this is what Americans eat. One bite, one gag, and “‘mazza che zozzeria!” (how disgusting!)

And he goes back to the pasta with the iconic line, “Maccarone, m’hai provocato e io te distruggo!” (Maccarone, you provoked me, and now I’ll destroy you!)

It truly is one of the first iconic Italian comedies. Italy went as far as putting it on the very exclusive list of 100 films to preserve.

If you squint enough, you might see the reverse of your own fascination with Italy. However, yours, as a reader of mine, will be a lot more grounded in reality.

2. Totò, Peppino e la malafemmina (1956)

Next, Totò, the man Italy calls il principe della risata (the prince of laughter). Almost 60 years after his death, he’s still worshipped in Naples and appreciated throughout Italy.

Antonio De Curtis (the short version of his full noble title, which includes 13 words) filmed nearly a hundred comedies. Backed by Peppino De Filippo, another Neapolitan comedy giant, Totò, Peppino e la malafemmina (Toto, Peppino, and the Hussy) is one of his most popular films.

Two southern brothers travel to Milan to rescue their nephew from a malafemmina (a no-good woman). The provincial vs big city contrast is made obvious in various ways, including a scene where they ask a vigile (municipal police) for the woman’s address, as if Milan were a village of 600 people. They also pack fur coats in summer, because they were told Milan has fog.

But the most quoted scene remains the threatening letter that Totò dictates to Peppino. It’s a grammar horror show with absurd punctuation spelled out literally as dictated. “Punto, punto e virgola, punto, e un punto e virgola!” (Period, semi colon, period, and semicolon!) Italians quote it the way the British recite the dead parrot.

Totò’s wordplay is not for the faint of heart. Even Italians who are not from Campania struggle with it, and translated subtitles fail to capture its true essence. What survives, however, are his iconic facial expressions and humorous mannerisms.

If this movie can make you laugh despite the language barrier, you’ll have ninety-some more films to look forward to. If it doesn’t, no harm, and you can always revisit it when your mastery of the Italian language has improved.

3. I soliti ignoti (1958)

I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street) is often considered the start of the commedia all’italiana, and it features an amazing cast of some of the most famous Italian actors, including Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni, Totò, and Claudia Cardinale.

A crew of broke Roman amateurs plans the perfect heist. Only, it’s a comedy of errors that leads to hilarious mishaps.

Vittorio Gassman plays a boxer with CTE, Marcello Mastroianni minds a baby between crimes, and Totò acts as the safecracking consultant who lectures on a terrace with the authority of a tenured university professor.

All of it two years before the first Ocean’s Eleven (with its own incredible cast) appeared. A genuinely funny movie that earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film.

The humor is situational, so English subtitles don’t lose much, and the Criterion’s ones are particularly good. Just know there is more than just laughter here. Bonus: postwar Rome acts as the co-star.

4. Divorzio all’italiana (1961)

Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce Italian Style) is a comedy that hides its true criticism of society behind light entertainment.

The premise is simple. At the time, first-degree murder gave you, at a minimum, a sentence of 21 years in prison. Article 587 offered a major discount in case of an honor killing. Pietro Germi looked at that gap and made a comedy around it.

Mastroianni plays a Sicilian baron with brilliantine who is infatuated with his first cousin. He wants to marry her, but the obstacle is not so much that she is a cousin. The problem is that he’s in an unhappy marriage at a time when divorce is still illegal in Italy.

So he comes up with an idea. He tries to lure his wife into an affair, enabling him to kill her at a deep penalty discount. The plan had a few hiccups, but the movie itself worked, and the screenplay even won an Oscar.

For the record, divorce arrived in Italy only in 1970, and the honor discount survived for another twenty years after the movie came out. It was comedy, but also journalism.

5. La ragazza con la pistola (1968)

Remember Article 587? This is the other end of the gun. Assunta is a Sicilian woman seduced and then abandoned by a man who flees to London to avoid marrying her.

Since her family has no men left to avenge her honor, she packs a pistol and follows him all the way to Britain.

Monica Vitti was the face of elegant despair at the time. Monicelli bet that the saddest woman in Italian art cinema was actually its funniest, and won.

She took a Nastro d’Argento and a David for her role, while the movie got an Oscar nomination. She also established herself as one of the biggest box-office draws in Italian cinema for two decades.

6. Amici miei (1975)

Amici miei (My friends) is a comedy about five friends who fight off mortality and their midlife crisis with zingarate (elaborate pranks). Instead of looking at the tragedy of their daily lives, they escape on little side quests full of childish but hilarious behavior that affects their families and the people around them.

Their pranks include slapping the faces of strangers leaning out of departing trains or convincing a widower at the cemetery that his wife was cheating on him.

Perhaps their most notable prank is inventing a plausible-sounding but nonsensical language: the so-called supercazzola.

Delivered with total confidence, the five friends use supercazzola to confuse the authorities who question their antics. A half-century later, it even entered the official Treccani vocabulary, and Italian politicians accuse each other of supercazzole on the parliamentary record.

I find these movies (it’s technically a trilogy) hilarious but also bittersweet. They say most people live lives of quiet desperation. These friends certainly do.

7. Fantozzi (1975) and Il secondo tragico Fantozzi (1976)

(OK, technically two films, one entry.)

It all began with Paolo Villaggio performing a chronically unlucky everyman in his TV sketches in the late 1960s. The character, Ugo Fantozzi, spilled into short stories Villaggio wrote for magazines like L’Espresso and L’Europeo, then a best-selling book.

From 1975, it became a film series, with Villaggio himself as the narrator and in the role of a corporate accountant abused by his employer and life itself.

On the surface, this is all very silly. The comedy has many slapstick elements. The genius of Fantozzi, however, lies beneath the surface. Under the veneer of surreal comedy, you’ll find a sharp satirical critique of Italian society in the 70s and 80s. A society that didn’t offer many prospects to the majority of the population.

It’s a comedy saga by all means, but it’s tragicomic. The tragedy is always there like a shadow of the comedy. We laugh at Fantozzi far more than we laugh with him, but feel bad for it. In part due to empathy towards him and in part because deep down we find a bit of Fantozzi within us.

His surname became a dictionary adjective: fantozziano. Every Italian workplace indignity you will ever suffer has already happened to him, worse.

Fair warning: this is humiliation comedy. If the British Office gives you cramps, stretch first.

8. Febbre da cavallo (1976)

I grew up around the racetrack since most of my family worked there. So Febbre da cavallo (Horse Fever) was particularly funny and meaningful to me.

Interestingly, it flopped when it came out. It only earned 200 million lire at the box office (roughly 100K euros, not adjusted for inflation). Critics shrugged it as well. Yet, decades of late-night TV reruns allowed it to achieve cult status.

Gigi Proietti is Mandrake, and Enrico Montesano is Er Pomata. Both Roman nicknames for two gamblers with the habit of ruining their lives and finances at the trotting racetrack. In the process of trying to find funds to gamble, they engage in all sorts of scams and side quests.

It all ends up in a courtroom where gambling itself effectively goes on trial.

The film even gave Rome a new word, the mandrakata, for an ingenious hustle pulled off against all odds. If you want to understand Roman humor specifically (broke, boastful, endlessly clever), this is foundational material.

9. Bianco, rosso e Verdone (1981)

Take producer Sergio Leone, add scores by Ennio Morricone, and bring over Mario Brega straight from the Dollars trilogy. What you get is not another “Western” but a classic of Italian comedy.

It’s election day, and three radically different men across Italy head for the voting booth. Carlo Verdone plays all of them:

• Furio is the pedantic husband who is insufferable to his wife, two children, and ultimately anyone around him.

• Pasquale is a rough emigrant who barely speaks (and when he finally does, he does so in a Southern dialect). He gets robbed piece by piece on his trip from the border to the voting polls.

• Mimmo is a bit of a simpleton/softie who escorts his grandmother, played by Sora Lella (a real institution in Rome).

Verdone and the spaghetti-western A-Team built a legendary comedy about voting that is still quoted in Italy 45 years later.

Quoting Furio, I occasionally annoy my fiancée by asking her: “Alicia, tu mi adori?” (Alicia, do you adore me?) to which she’ll reply, “Sì, Antonio,” and I’ll finish it off with, “Allora lo vedi che la cosa è reciproca.” (Then, you see that it’s reciprocal.)

10. Non ci resta che piangere (1984)

To me, Non ci resta che piangere (Nothing Left to Do but Cry) is the perfect comedy featuring two giants from very different Italian schools of comedy.

The Tuscan humor of Roberto Benigni meets the Neapolitan humor of Massimo Troisi in a time-travel film chock-full of funny sketches.

The two wake up in 1492 and must survive in a very different time. Their first thought is that all their modern knowledge could help with scientific and technological advancement, so they seek out Leonardo da Vinci.

They quickly realize they don’t actually know how anything modern works, from the bulb to the toilet. So they end up attempting to teach him how to play modern card games instead. Hilariously, a genius like Leonardo struggles to follow the rules, frustrating them.

Among other side quests, they end up writing a letter to Savonarola in an attempt to stop Columbus from discovering America. Yes, this is an open homage to the Totò and Peppino letter from entry two.

The “un fiorino” joke from the dinner above? It comes from this movie as well. A fiorino is a florin, the Renaissance coin, and in the film, there is a scene where a border guard mechanically asks for one each time someone passes by. They keep losing cargo and passing by to put it back on their cart, triggering the guard who keeps asking for “un fiorino.”

Italians have muttered “un fiorino” when passing the highway toll booth for forty years. Or maybe it’s just my friends and me.

Benigni and Troisi became close friends after this movie. The two different styles of comedy shouldn’t have worked together, but somehow they contrasted in hilarious ways.

Sadly, Troisi died at only 41, twelve hours after the final take of Il Postino (1994, The Postman), which won an Oscar for its score and earned Troisi two posthumous nominations. He postponed his heart surgery to finish shooting the movie, and that cost him dearly.

If you enjoy his mannerisms and humor, watch his earlier work in Ricomincio da tre (1981, I’m Starting from Three) as well.

11. Tre uomini e una gamba (1997)

Aldo, Giovanni e Giacomo are the most popular comedy trio in Italian history, and Tre uomini e una gamba (Three Men and a Leg) is their breakout comedy.

Three hardware store workers take a road trip from Milan to Puglia since Giacomo is getting married to the hardware store owner’s daughter. As a favor to the father-in-law, they need to carry a hideous wooden leg sculpted by a fictional artist named Garpez.

As you can imagine, they manage to screw it up, and in the process, gift us many laughs. The subtitles are helpful here, but much of their comedy is physical and translates well without much aid.

12. Quo vado? (2016)

Checco Zalone is a controversial comedian in Italy. My brother-in-law said to us, “I cannot stand his right-wing humor.”

Alicia and I find him hilarious. Here’s where the split happens: Checco plays a boisterous Southern character in every movie he’s in. Some people will see him as satirizing the tamarro (a tacky/flashy/boorish guy), and others will see him as flattering him.

He himself has said that he appeals to the dumbest and the smartest people in Italy, and it’s the middle group that can’t stand him.

Well, the box office numbers show that he’s more appreciated than he gives himself credit for. Quo vado? (Where Am I Going?) earned over 65 million euros and sold about 9.3 million tickets, roughly one Italian in six.

It held the record as the highest-grossing Italian film until this January, when Buen Camino passed it and then overtook Avatar to become the highest-grossing film of any kind in Italian box-office history.

The premise of the movie is pretty simple, but it perfectly captures many Italian traditions and attitudes. Checco has the one sacred Italian possession: the posto fisso (a permanent job with the government). When the state tries to make him resign, he refuses. They offer him money, and he refuses because “il posto fisso è sacro!” (The permanent job is sacred!)

They try to mob him. “Come mi rilassa il mobbing!” (Mobbing really relaxes me!) Nothing, Checco won’t resign. So they eventually transfer him to less and less desirable places, including the North Pole, where he meets a romantic interest, leading to him becoming more Northern European-like.

If you want to know what Italy laughs at now, not what it did in 1962, start here. Checco is actually a talented musician as well, so the satirical songs in the movie are half the act.

What about Perfetti Sconosciuti?

I’m intentionally leaving out Perfetti Sconosciuti (2016, Perfect Strangers).

It holds an unusual Guinness World Record: the most remade film in history, adapted two dozen times and counting (yes, the Italian one is the original).

It’s a great movie, but it doesn’t make the top 12 because, to me, it’s less a comedy than an emotional knife fight. The Roman humor shines through, though, and you should still watch it.

The careful reader will realize I just included Pefetti Sconosciuti to some degree in the list. Consider it a baker’s dozen, then.

In conclusion

You really should look up these movies and try to watch them. It will greatly enhance your cultural understanding of Italy and what resonates as funny to Italians.

Generally speaking, these are all relatively easy to find online. Some are on YouTube. Some on mainstream streaming platforms. Others can be bought on Criterion. And a VPN will likely allow you to see them from places that are geography-restricted online (arr, not that I’m advocating it, matey).

For some, you’ll struggle to find versions with proper English subtitles. That, in itself, might be a bit of a mandrakata.

So the permanent fix is to learn enough Italian that you won’t need English subtitles. These twelve (well, thirteen) are the most enjoyable curriculum the language has to offer.

If you liked this article, subscribe (for un fiorino).

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