With his newest film, however, Benigni seems to have locked onto a no-lose combination of humor and pathos. Life is Beautiful left the attendees of this year's Cannes film fest with jaws agape. Why? Because it is, ostensibly, a comedy about life in a Nazi prison camp. That isn't a comic subject most folks would dare to touch. We're not talking about a foolish POW camp a la "Hogan's Heroes" either. We're talking a real deal Jewish death camp. Touchy subject, no? Drawing on reserves few could have guessed he even possessed, though, Benigni has crafted a wonderful, funny and life-affirming little gem.

Life begins as a comic romance as Guido (Benigni), an energetic country boy freshly moved to the big city, woos a beautiful school teacher named Dora (Benigni's real life wife Nicoletta Braschi) in pre-war Italy. There are hints of the impending conflict (fascism is discussed, well dressed soldiers wander the streets), but for the most part, the first half of the film is a gentle romance. Benigni's character is an imaginative rake--to call him a liar is a bit harsh, but he does spend most of his time spinning fanciful tales. Upon first meeting his lady love, Guido claims to be a prince who will soon be re-seeding the land on which she lives with wall-to-wall camels. At one point, he shows up at the school where Dora teaches posing as a government inspector and delivers a wonderful lampooning of Nazi eugenics to her students ("Obviously we are the master race. Look at this ear. Have you ever seen a more beautiful ear?").

Eventually, the two hook up, and the film's second half takes a dramatic turn. Things skip ahead a few years. Guido and Dora are married and have a young son, Giosué. The war now is in full swing. Being a Jew, Guido is a frequent target of harassment. Eventually, the family is rounded up and sent off to a prison camp. Unable to tell his young son the truth about their incarceration, Guido falls back on an imaginative lie. He tells Giosué that they are being sent to a special summer camp. If they obey all the rules, they can gather points. The first person in camp to amass 1,000 points wins a real-life tank! While Guido labors during the day, his son engages in such "games" as hiding from the stormtroopers who are gathering up children for the gas chambers. Here, the film is straddling a precarious line, but it plows ahead like a seasoned tightrope walker without so much as a stumble.

Numerous comedians have tried to walk that fine line between comedy and pathos. Few have ever succeeded like this. Jerry Lewis, the ultimate crying on the inside kind of clown, even tried his hand at making a prison camp comedy. The Day the Clown Cried featured Lewis as a circus clown trying to cheer up children in a WWII prison camp. It was, like most of Lewis' more indulgent work, syrupy and filled with bathos (for you nontheater majors, that's the bad kind of pathos). The film was never even released to theaters, perhaps due to studio skittishness. Most recently, Billy Crystal has injected his films (Father's Day, My Giant) with a cloying dose of schmaltz. I suppose there's an impulse in every comedian to be dramatic, but it usually comes out as maudlin sentiment. Chaplin got the mixture right in films like City Lights and The Kid. In Life is Beautiful, Benigni applies his pathos with an eyedropper and comes up with a precise mixture of hopeful humor and touching emotion.