Life Is Beautiful draws on the entire history of slapstick moviemaking, but the subject matter keeps it from feeling quaintly nostalgic. Guido meets Dora when Italian anti-Semitism is more in the way of a shame than a crime, and thus relatively easy to mock. In one sequence, for instance, Guido shows up at Dora's school wearing an inspector's sash he snatched at the restaurant specifically so he could see her again, only to discover the "inspector" is scheduled to give a speech on Aryan racial superiority. Guido charms Dora by travestying the stupidity of the notion. Later, when thugs paint Guido's uncle's horse green and write anti-Semitic threats on it, Guido rides the defaced animal like a steed into Dora's engagement party and spirits her away.

The film then jumps ahead a few years when Guido and Dora are married and have a tiny, big-eyed son Giosué (Giorgio Cantarini), and when the situation is considerably worse — Jews are banned from "Aryan" shops and Guido's bookshop is marked as a Jewish business. Next, father and son are deported to a concentration camp, and to protect Giosué Guido tells him that it's all a game — whoever wins the most points gets a brand new tank. Not a toy, but a real tank. The fantasticness of Benigni's handling of the concentration camp is the movie's real distinction. The conditions we see are not realistically dehumanizing; the barracks look comfortless but not filthy and the internees have not reached the point of turning on each other. Even the slave labor is stylized: Guido and the other men spend their days lugging anvils up to a gigantic cauldron, a motif that gives slapstick a dimension of ironic mythopoeia. At the same time, Guido's buoyancy considerably lightens the unavoidable pathos. Benigni makes the game take over the atmosphere of the concentration camp; not even murderous fascist racism can get Guido down.

The Holocaust is inherently sobering and Benigni's frolicsome approach, while not meant to assault our sensitivity to it, can't sit comfortably on what we know about the camps. At one point a German guard asks for an internee to translate as he rattles off the camp rules. Guido volunteers, not because he speaks German (he doesn't), but because he doesn't want Giosué to find out that the game isn't for real. So Guido "translates" the German's speech by relating to his bewildered fellow prisoners the rules of the game he's made up for his son. This madcap spree of verbal slapstick, an act of desperation to rival Chaplin's café song at the end of Modern Times (1936), is inappropriate given the setting but even funnier for that very reason. My jaw hit the floor but that didn't stop me from laughing. There's a fine line between bad taste and comic audacity; what Benigni gets from treading that line, until it disappears, is to create a fable of paternal love that survives the camps.