This movie is a disgrace; it tries to hide the collaboration of Italian fascists to the deportation of thousands of Jews and non-Jews to death camps during WWII in Italy. Believe me, Italian fascists were as obnoxiously criminal (and sometimes even more) as their German peers. In this fascist revisionist libel Italian fascists are depicted like harmless comical characters untouched by the crimes against humanity, they and their German associates were responsible for, crimes that live and will live in infamy until the end of times.<br /><br />Death camps according Roberto Benigni were some kind of poorly managed boot-camps in which you could mange to survive by means of being slightly more intelligent than the average prisoner. There's a moment of the movie when Benigni manages to reach the lowest – an endeavour you had thought not possible after one hour and a half of the previous ordeal – it is when he, very underhandedly, provides the viewers with a thick mist in order to veil, that is to hide, a pile of corpses of prisoners murdered by the Nazis.<br /><br />Let us suppose, just for the sake of the present argument, that a fascist movie can be funny – this is arguably a fascist movie – well there isn't a single funny scene in this poor excuse for a movie, the joke are trite and all of them can be predicted by someone who has seen at least one cheap comedy before.<br /><br />This thing has been unjustly compared to The Great Dictator, which is maybe the worst movie Charlie Chaplin did, but the the comparison is still unfair, The Great Dictator is an overrated sentimental bad movie, but it is not fascist propaganda like Roberto Benigni's.<br /><br />If you want to see an excellent Italian comedy dealing with the same subject try Lina Wermüller's Pasqualino Settebellezze (1975) http://imdb.com/title/tt0075040. You will not forget the sequence in which the great Giancarlo Giannini seduces a two tons whale-sized SS woman officer in order to save his life.