Fantozzi | Paolo Villaggio | Kafka | Dilbert | Organizational Absurdity

Fantozzi at 50

A timeless satire of organizational absurdity

Fifty years ago, Italian cinema gave us one of its most brutally honest workplace satires: Fantozzi. On the surface, it’s a slapstick comedy about a hapless accountant trapped in a soul-crushing corporation.

But beneath the gags lies a grotesque, Kafkaesque mirror held up to the madness of organizational life. Like The Trial meets Dilbert, Fantozzi exposes the mind-numbing absurdity of bureaucratic institutions, managerial folly, and the human behaviours that sustain them.

The film’s protagonist, Ugo Fantozzi, is so iconic that the Treccani encyclopedia immortalized him as an adjective, Fantozziano:

clumsy and obsequious toward superiors — or, when used to describe a situation, painfully ridiculous.

Paolo Villaggio in a scene of the film “Fantozzi”, 1975 — Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The film weaponizes slapstick to lampoon institutional absurdity: in an iconic sequence, Fantozzi — desperately rushing to clock in on time — sprints through the office corridors as colleagues cheer him on like a marathon runner — only for him to collapse dramatically. When a coworker moves to help, another shouts, ‘Don’t help him, or…