Before Pintus, preview of the Italian comedy show

Before Pintus

After the success of the first season of League: Who Laughs Is Out, Prime Video continues to offer content in the name of comedy and laughter, with the return to the screen of one of the contestants from the aforementioned game show. This is Angelo Pintus, now back with Before Pintus, a comedy show series in 8 episodes of about half an hour each from April 19 on the Jeff Bezos streaming platform that answers a fundamental question: what is the life of a famous showman before he achieves success? To begin to answer this question, we previewed the first episode of this new TV series, able to tell the daily, personal and professional events of a talented comedian, but without the beak of a penny. How did the revival of a genre that is slowly disappearing in Italy go? We tell it in our review without spoilers, but lots of laughs.

Before Pintus, what lies behind a comedian

Angelo is a comedian looking for the right opportunity to prove what he is worth. Forty years and a gift, to make people laugh, he was an entertainer in tourist villages for a few years, and then performed between one monologue and another in the Milanese capital, Milan, club after club, grinding cabaret shows and stands up comedy, with comedians or aspiring comedians. Let's meet our "hero" of laughter at Lele's, the small Milanese club where every evening he takes the stage to do his piece, and give life to that quarter of an hour of show that gives meaning to the rest of his day .

The place, as the name suggests, is owned by Lele (played by Max Vitale), who is also the down-and-out and unlikely agent of Angelo and his colleagues who gravitate around the cabaret. Among these Rita (Rita Pelusio), a comedian who has a great passion for social justice and for Angelo (but will it be reciprocated?), Alongside Max (Max Pieriboni), the transformer always in costume, and Andrea (Andrea Pisani of PanPers ), the presenter of the restaurant, who has not yet understood what he dreams of doing "when he grows up". The star of the venue, on the other hand, is TheGiorgio (Walter Leonardi), a character who gives himself the air of an intellectual, but looks much more like a scoundrel, and that Angelo can't stand for his comedy, amidst abused catchphrases and jokes of dubious taste.



Not just laughter, but also work, or at least you try. To support himself, Angelo works as a waiter in a "Chinese-pizzeria-fusion" restaurant on the outskirts of Milan, the Fujohn, where he rehearses with customers the lines for the piece that, from time to time, he is preparing, without arousing however, in the in most cases, the hoped-for enthusiasm. The main colleagues we meet are Ibrahim (Elia Moutamid), the friendly Egyptian pizza chef, but actually of Moroccan origins and born in Brescia, with a heavy local accent, Wu (Jonathan Guerrero), the son of the owner of the Fujohn, a Filipino who pretends to be Chinese, and Luca (Luca Peracino of PanPers), the other waiter, completely stunned and able to create confusion and misunderstandings with customers.

Before Pintus, behind the scenes of a comic

In all this, clearly, in the context of a clear economic poverty, Angelo does not even have a house, as he cannot afford it. In this first episode, after being kicked out of the house by his roommate, when he discovers him in bed with his mother, Angelo finds hospitality from Nello (Maurizio Casagrande), an Italian professor and regular customer of the Fujohn. Angelo therefore tries to soften him without too much effort, when he asks him to be hosted, and he seems not to have to last only "a couple of days", as promised by the comedian.



In Nello's palace , Angelo finds a world of condominiums that repeatedly break into the apartment. The most intrusive is Bonetti (Marco Ripoldi), the conspiratorial neighbor who knows the truth about everything: from electromagnetic waves to vaccines, passing through the microchips under the skin and the hidden economic powers embodied by Bill Gates. Nello treats him with condescension, without giving him rope, instead Angelo tries in vain to use logic to make him think. Another character is Bea (Beatrice Baldaccini), a very pretty thirty-year-old student and out of course, but without really knowing what she studies. A jumble of characters that bring color and liveliness to the screen, a human team well blended in this cocktail of joy.

A mix of comedy between USA and Italy

The story behind this background of a showman we know very well today, but who is clearly the son of a long and tortuous path like so many of them, is inserted in a serial narration that tries to evoke the style and characteristics of the classic American sitcom, also combined with shows older and more recent Italian comedy: from Buona la Prima by Ale and Franz, where however the audience and the mechanics of improvisation are missing, to the family stories of Casa Surace, to also recall the format of the web series, up to show older, like you are strong dad! with Enzo Iacchetti at Belli Dentro.

In this product, on the other hand, we find the rhythm and mechanisms of contemporary comedy, in an attempt to break the Italian way to the story of a comedian's life, which starts from the monologue and then becomes the theme of the episode, as in American sitcoms such as Seinfeld or Louie, where the private and the fictional intersect. In this sense, the classic scheme of the sitcom is enriched with external shots of sketches that underline or act as a premise and comment on the themes that Angelo deals with in the monologues on the stage of the club, or that constitute flashbacks or flashforwards with respect to the situations described.

* As far as we were able to see only the first half hour of a few hours that seem well promising, Before Pintus is a light, cheerful show, capable of bringing comedy to our screens and which we hope will improve even more. more as you grind episodes. Probably not a concentrate of joy like the aforementioned League, but still absolutely noteworthy.