Job description: A funny thing happened on the way to the tragedy. Or so runs the premise of films that mine the power of life-affirming laughs in the face of sadness and horror. Call it the opposite of the tears of a clown, or the ability to smile when the whole world isn't smiling with you.
Recently seen in: Italian master of pathos and pratfalls Roberto Benigni's return to the silver screen, The Tiger and the Snow. Benigni (right) writes, directs and stars in this film about a love-struck Italian poet caught in Iraq at the start of the US-led invasion. His attempts to win a beautiful woman's heart (his real-life wife Nicoletta Braschi) go unrewarded in Rome, so he follows her to Iraq, where she's injured in a bombing raid while working on a biography of an Iraqi poet.
This sets the stage for Benigni to do what Benigni does best: namely, find the funny side of violent disaster while weaving a compelling fable about love. Added interest comes from a supporting cast that includes Jean Reno at his mournful best and a strange, gruff Tom Waits.
Most likely to say: 'I want to be rocked by waves of your love, with egg salad sandwiches in aisles of liquid.' (Especially if he wins another Oscar.)
Classics of the genre: A brooding Leonardo DiCaprio cracks wise in Marvin's Room (1996), based on Scott McPherson's play of the same name, which opened shortly before McPherson died of Aids. The laughs and the tears fall in equal measure as we're taken on an emotional roller coaster through a dysfunctional family's reconciliation. The all-star cast includes Robert De Niro (as a doctor with a penchant for one-liners), Dan Hedaya (as his bumblingly inept brother), Diane Keaton (as the leukaemia-stricken aunt), and Meryl Streep (as her chain-smoking, hard-boiled sister).
More tears are jerked along with chuckles by Robin Williams in 1998's Patch Adams. (Not everyone's cup of tea - reviewer Roger Ebert wrote: 'It's not merely a tearjerker. It extracts tears individually by liposuction, without anaesthesia.') Williams plays a troubled man who gets well with the help of the patients in a mental hospital, enrols in medical school, and discovers to his horror that the world of medicine is just a big evil business. So Patch decides to teach the world that laughter is the best medicine.
