Cutting humor?

Roberto Benigni's The Monster is the highest-grossing film in Italian history, surpassing the record set by Benigni's previous comedy, Johnny Stecchino. Which suggests that the Italians have pretty twisted senses of humor.

The loose-limbed writer/director/star is often compared to Jerry Lewis, not just for his skill at creating slapstick vehicles for himself, but for his hyper-aggressive yet oddly innocent sexuality. Jim Jarmusch fans know him from Down by Law and Night on Earth, where he played a cabbie who gave a heart attack to a priest with a screamingly funny confession involving a pumpkin, a sheep, and his neighbor's wife.

With Monster, he takes this sexual obsessiveness to an outrageous new extreme. No gag is too crude or shameful for Benigni; he makes Jim Carrey movies look like Merchant/Ivory films. As long as you can forget how utterly appalling its premise is, Monster is absolutely hilarious.

Like Johnny Stecchino, Monster is one long mistaken-identity riff, with Benigni as a schlemiel mistaken for a wanted criminal, and with Nicoletta Braschi (Benigni's off-screen wife) playing a tough cookie who crumbles under the onslaught of Benigni's sweet ineffectuality. Here Benigni's character, Loris, is actually a criminal, though just a small-time con man. But police mistake him for a serial killer who rapes and slashes women. The film begins with a scream and an off-screen murder, an opening that the rest of the movie seems dedicated to making you forget.

Loris has a part-time job moving mannequins and other objects, and a mishap involving an errant chainsaw held at crotch-level convinces a terrified female onlooker that he's the killer. As the police put him under surveillance, forensic psychologist Taccone (Michel Blanc) comes up with increasingly baroque theories to describe Loris's odd behavior. The cops assign an intrepid, voluptuous detective, Jessica Rosetti (Braschi), to move into Loris's apartment building and entrap him.

Most of Loris's quirky behavior can be attributed to his con artistry, some of which is brilliant (check out his schemes for outwitting the magnetic shoplifting sensors at a department store, or for discouraging new tenants from taking the apartment on which he owes back rent). The rest can be attributed to general klutziness, such as the time he tries to disentangle himself from a mannequin but appears, from behind, to be humping it with a vengeance.

Horny as Loris is, he's overwhelmed by Jessica's continuous flaunting of her charms. She, in turn, is stymied by his unwillingness to pounce upon her. But Taccone is certain that Loris is the one, and he gets the guy convicted by the newscasters and stirs the public into paranoid group-think faster than you can say Ted Kaczynski. When the true killer is unmasked, the revelation seems arbitrary, but Benigni does get in some satirical digs at how the police, the media, and the public rush to judgment.

Benigni's grace as a physical comedian is not in doubt, but he also proves gifted as a builder of elaborate gags. Although every joke has an immediate punch line, many of them also pay off some minutes of screen time later. There is no extraneous information in the film; the gags build by accretion until they climax in expertly orchestrated set pieces, like the one in which Taccone and his wife come over to have dinner with Loris and Jessica. While his wife, terrified at the prospect of being in the same apartment with the serial killer, cowers in another room, the manic Taccone pokes and prods Loris with strange devices (Loris has been told that he's just a really meticulous tailor measuring him for a suit). Door-slamming chaos ensues, coming to a head with a gag involving a breakaway dress that was introduced much earlier.

The key sequence shows Loris going through the petty humiliations of a typical day. What he doesn't realize is that most of his actions have been captured by a police officer's movie camera. Later Taccone views the heavily edited film, putting his speculative, malicious spin on what we know to be innocuous events. This is perhaps Benigni's way of critiquing his own potentially offensive film. He seems to be warning that you can't believe what you see, so you shouldn't take any of it too seriously.