Based on Paolo Villaggio's books "Fantozzi" and "Il secondo, tragico Fantozzi", which are popular in Italy, this film tells the story of an unfortunate accountant's life over the course of one year, shown in a variety of sketches, segments and provocative sequences making Fantozzi a very unlucky person indeed.

Returning to themes he first explored in La strada (1954), Fellini crafts a parable on the whisperings of the soul that only madmen and vagabonds are capable of hearing. The odd couple, Ivo Salvini (Benigni), a fake inspector of wells, and Gonnella (Villaggio), a former prefect, wander through the Emilia-Romagna countryside of Fellini's childhood and discover a dystopia of television commercials, fascism, beauty pageants, rock music, Catholicism, and pagan ritual.