Italian Comedy Style anchors itself on the blend of comedic and dramatic elements in an attempt to provide a commentary on Italian living, much like Neorealism. In this way, as Italian living would shift as time went on, so would the genre, cementing itself as a mainstay of Italian cinema for years to come. The blend of comedy and drama found in Comedy Italian style finds itself on a very similar ground to that of Neorealist films in a variety of degrees. While Neorealism used actors typically known in comedy for dramatic scenes, Comedy Italian Style was known to use dramatic actors in the role of comedic characters. Both characters are used to display the films message of a commentary on the evils of contemporary society.
Audiences had originally been exposed to Vittorio Gassman as a smooth, yet dangerous man in Bitter Rice. However, in some of the first scenes we see him in in Big Deal on Madonna street, he is a braggadocious boxer who quickly gets knocked out and looks like a fool.
In the same breath, it also called for a change in Italian society against the evils it would present, to breakdown the cultural bonds of Italy’s past and reorganize them into whatever the filmmaker deemed as a “better future”, or generally a more positive outlook. In theory, to cause audiences to want to also reach that better future, the current reality would be portrayed in a nery harsh light. As defined by Grande, Commedia All’Italiana is a film style that:
“Presents a society that is deaf, unthinking, cynical, indifferent, blind, arrogant, aggressive, amoral, derisive, fickle, greedy for success and ready to pay any price for it, without historical depth or national sentiment, lacking a sense of the future and of collective planning.”
In attempting to reflect a picture of the Italian people in the film style, Comedy Italian Style films would also share with Neorealism the trend of using the working-class as the main characters and conduits for which the themes of the film are explored. By depicting the everyday life of the common man, one would gain much more insight on the big picture of historical threads. However, there is a bit of a discrepancy in exactly how they were used. Given the longevity of the genre, some shifts are bound to happen. As time would go on, the middle-class man would go from the typical italiani brava gente to a role that would speak much more on the Crisis of the Italian Man, commenting on changing gender roles through a much more negative mask. This negative portrayal of the Italian man as a largely self-indulgent creature would become a persistent theme in Italian Comedy Style. The i vitelloni, young men who wandered aimlessly as old values were being left behind in society without new ones taking their place. The Crisis of the Man was a common theme throughout this time, as negative portrayals of men would be struggling with traditionally held obligations to family and society, while also being torn away from those values from new pressures.
While Mimi hadn't been with his wife for a long while due to his love for Fiore, when it comes to notice that Fiore had also been having an affair on the side, Mimi is drawn into a fit of rage when he thinks how people would think of him as a cuckold. Given the importance of the Catholic Church to Italians and their view on divorce, it might have been easier had there been not such a societal obligation to remain in a loveless marriage.
Comedy Italian Style approaches its comedic value through the actions and tropes of its characters, like most Comedies, but what separates it from the rest is its carefully chosen backdrops of the dramatic history of Italy. The overall plot at times can seem very light, but it is the consequences of the setting that can often be the reason for the actions in the first place. According to Maurizio Grande, who refers to Comedy Italian Style as Epic Comedy, it is “the ‘anomalous’ relationship established between the tragic backdrop of civilized society and the comic proscenium of individual life.”
In this sequence from Big Deal on Madonna Street, certain hiding characters have the contents of a chamber pot thrown on them in a comic scene. However, it, and the general state of the home around it, give an insight into the lives of the poor in Italy at the time. At this time, Indoor plumbing was still a thing yet this man resorts to using a repurposed bowl that he just keeps out in the open.