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CAPO FEAR De Niro as a comic crime boss in "Analyze This"

When people think of Robert De Niro's recent roles, they see him as either deadly serious or seriously deadly. But they forget that when he's not whacking mobsters or acting psycho he can be quite the cutup ("Wag the Dog," "Midnight Run"). In the new comedy "Analyze This," playing a gun-toting Mafia boss who seeks therapy because of his anxiety attacks, De Niro gets a chance to break bones and flex funny bones. "After one joke, he kept saying, 'I love this. I should do a Neil Simon play,'" Billy Crystal, De Niro's costar, tells EW Online.

Of course, even in a comedy De Niro found a way to exhibit his actorly intensity, as in a scene where he blubbers cartoonishly after a psychological breakthrough. "All it says in the script is, 'He starts crying,'" remembers "Analyze" director Harold Ramis. "And he ran with that and got so into it. Eventually Billy and I started saying to each other, 'Do you think this is a little over the top?' And Bob saw us whispering, and he knew exactly what we were thinking, so he started crying even more. That's his instinct, where other people get timid, he gets bolder." No wonder: After seeing him in "Cape Fear," who's gonna tell De Niro to calm down?