Abstract
The central issue of this article is the act of storytelling as a positive moral act of testimony, even when the historical content is altered by the invention of comedic fiction. History is no less a fiction whose coherence is imposed in retrospect by the narrative written to contextualize it. Through the prism of Primo Levi's pseudo-historical accounts of the concentration camps, this article demonstrates how Roberto Benigni and Radu Mihaileanu offer new messages and force their viewers to re-examine events of the Shoah through humour without diminishing the gravity of them. Through comedy and fairy-tale, the two directors capture the humanity of both those who survived and those who did not. These films are not revisions as much as criticisms of the absurdity of the Holocaust. The directors borrow the Holocaust's absurd language and logic in their parodies and recodify them in their fables. We see in “La vita è bella” and “Train de vie” that the greatest danger is not in making a comedy about the Shoah but in forgetting to tell the story to contemporary audiences in ways that cause them to reassess their past and their humanity.
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