Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: Paul D. Zimmerman
Photography: Fred Schuler
Music: Robbie Robertson, Ray Charles
Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker
Cast: Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Diahnne Abbott, Sandra Bernhard, Ed Herlihy, Shelley Hack, Tony Randall, Martin Scorsese, Margo Winkler, Dr. Joyce Brothers
Director Martin Scorsese is famous for making great movies, but his best arguably fall into various types. This may be the last, for example, after Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, of his pictures featuring Robert De Niro as an unbalanced madman representing Social Decay. Another type is seen (at its best) in Goodfellas and Casino. The King of Comedy adroitly takes on celebrity culture and media criticism and does not feel 42 years old. One of the most surprising parts is that it was made decades before smartphones and social media, which now feel strangely missing from the action here. Another surprising and impressive part was snagging Jerry Lewis, who practically sold the movie on name recognition (to the limited extent it sold). He plays Jerry Langford, a late-night TV host modeled on Johnny Carson. And he is good, extremely low-key and self-contained. There’s no mugging or pratfalls, no loony voices. But you keep halfway expecting them, which creates an interesting tension.
Langford, like Johnny Carson, like any celebrity, has a lot of problems with fans and wannabes who won’t leave him alone. De Niro plays a wannabe named Rupert Pupkin. It’s an interesting role for De Niro because his signature rage is more subsumed under a slimy façade of someone who thinks he knows his way around show business. He wears natty suits with bold patterns and color schemes. He is soft-spoken and almost gentle. But the rage is there and so is the lunacy, once we get down to the basement of his mother’s place in New Jersey, where Pupkin lives. Everyone, including his mother (the bawling off-screen voice of Scorsese’s mother Catherine), plainly thinks he is a grating, pathetic loser. He wants to be famous and show everybody. The idea he comes up with to break through is to kidnap Langford and force him to let him do his standup in a prime spot on the show. In order to accomplish this Pupkin must enlist the aid of Sandra Bernhard as Masha, who proceeds to steal the whole show.
Director Martin Scorsese is famous for making great movies, but his best arguably fall into various types. This may be the last, for example, after Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, of his pictures featuring Robert De Niro as an unbalanced madman representing Social Decay. Another type is seen (at its best) in Goodfellas and Casino. The King of Comedy adroitly takes on celebrity culture and media criticism and does not feel 42 years old. One of the most surprising parts is that it was made decades before smartphones and social media, which now feel strangely missing from the action here. Another surprising and impressive part was snagging Jerry Lewis, who practically sold the movie on name recognition (to the limited extent it sold). He plays Jerry Langford, a late-night TV host modeled on Johnny Carson. And he is good, extremely low-key and self-contained. There’s no mugging or pratfalls, no loony voices. But you keep halfway expecting them, which creates an interesting tension.
Langford, like Johnny Carson, like any celebrity, has a lot of problems with fans and wannabes who won’t leave him alone. De Niro plays a wannabe named Rupert Pupkin. It’s an interesting role for De Niro because his signature rage is more subsumed under a slimy façade of someone who thinks he knows his way around show business. He wears natty suits with bold patterns and color schemes. He is soft-spoken and almost gentle. But the rage is there and so is the lunacy, once we get down to the basement of his mother’s place in New Jersey, where Pupkin lives. Everyone, including his mother (the bawling off-screen voice of Scorsese’s mother Catherine), plainly thinks he is a grating, pathetic loser. He wants to be famous and show everybody. The idea he comes up with to break through is to kidnap Langford and force him to let him do his standup in a prime spot on the show. In order to accomplish this Pupkin must enlist the aid of Sandra Bernhard as Masha, who proceeds to steal the whole show.
Actually, people take turns stealing this show, notably Lewis and De Niro, but Bernhard brings a uniquely intense level of the wacked-out, as an obsessive fan. Masha appears to be independently wealthy, with the time, resources, and focus to make the kidnapping possible, under Pupkin’s direction. She brings all the steely will necessary. She only wants time alone with Langford, which she finally gets in one of the picture’s nuttiest high points, with Langford all trussed up in packing tape like a mummy and Masha in a mood where she feels like anything could happen. She also has a gun.
Pupkin is unhinged but he’s capable of dreaming up and executing a plot. A lot of the first hour is spent examining the depths of Pupkin’s delusions. He manages a few minutes with Langford which he tries to milk as the basis for an industry relationship or connection. We can see he’s little more than a pest, particularly when he tries to press his advantage. But he doesn’t even seem to understand basics, like the necessity of experience in live comedy clubs or even of having an audio tape of his act. When we see him trying to make one, it’s evident he has no idea what he’s doing at all in the business.
We don’t actually see his act until late in the picture—until that point there has been a lot of artful drawing away as he goes into it. I saw The King of Comedy when it was new, and at that time I thought he might actually be funny. Then I thought he would be terrible. That’s closer to it. On my latest look it seemed almost good. The jokes aren’t very funny but they can still land. Pupkin (so De Niro too I guess) understands how to do standup, making it a somehow unsettling spectacle. Of course, as with Taxi Driver (and maybe Mean Streets too), there’s a heavy-handed ironical development. Pupkin goes to prison for his crime but that’s not the end of the story.
Sadly, I’m not sure we can talk about The King of Comedy at this point without bringing up the first Joker movie, from 2019. The Joaquin Phoenix Joker is now a franchise but I haven’t seen the sequel yet. It’s obvious how enamored director and cowriter Todd Phillips is of The King of Comedy. He was 12 when it came out and it was rated PG. I presume the rest is history, as they say. I was kind of meh overall about Joker, but it had its points. I appreciated Phillips’s instincts in looking so apishly to The King of Comedy—and casting Robert De Niro in the Jerry Lewis role is nearly as inspired as the original Lewis casting. But that’s the thing. Joker by definition, however skillful, is not original. All the best elements of The King of Comedy (like all of Scorsese’s best) were wholly original. It feels like a tightrope act sometimes it’s so sharp. It was prescient and strange and new. The critics tended to like it, but it crapped out in theaters and didn’t stick around long. Jerry Lewis was more of a draw for irony-laden hipsters and not the mainstream in 1982. And it was the third movie of this recognizable type, after all, which might have smelled formulaic, especially by those roiled up about the violence of Taxi Driver and Mean Streets. But in 2024 The King of Comedy feels glowingly fresh, with a round robin of great performances adding up to a mystifying spectacle that is strange and wonderful.
Pupkin is unhinged but he’s capable of dreaming up and executing a plot. A lot of the first hour is spent examining the depths of Pupkin’s delusions. He manages a few minutes with Langford which he tries to milk as the basis for an industry relationship or connection. We can see he’s little more than a pest, particularly when he tries to press his advantage. But he doesn’t even seem to understand basics, like the necessity of experience in live comedy clubs or even of having an audio tape of his act. When we see him trying to make one, it’s evident he has no idea what he’s doing at all in the business.
We don’t actually see his act until late in the picture—until that point there has been a lot of artful drawing away as he goes into it. I saw The King of Comedy when it was new, and at that time I thought he might actually be funny. Then I thought he would be terrible. That’s closer to it. On my latest look it seemed almost good. The jokes aren’t very funny but they can still land. Pupkin (so De Niro too I guess) understands how to do standup, making it a somehow unsettling spectacle. Of course, as with Taxi Driver (and maybe Mean Streets too), there’s a heavy-handed ironical development. Pupkin goes to prison for his crime but that’s not the end of the story.
Sadly, I’m not sure we can talk about The King of Comedy at this point without bringing up the first Joker movie, from 2019. The Joaquin Phoenix Joker is now a franchise but I haven’t seen the sequel yet. It’s obvious how enamored director and cowriter Todd Phillips is of The King of Comedy. He was 12 when it came out and it was rated PG. I presume the rest is history, as they say. I was kind of meh overall about Joker, but it had its points. I appreciated Phillips’s instincts in looking so apishly to The King of Comedy—and casting Robert De Niro in the Jerry Lewis role is nearly as inspired as the original Lewis casting. But that’s the thing. Joker by definition, however skillful, is not original. All the best elements of The King of Comedy (like all of Scorsese’s best) were wholly original. It feels like a tightrope act sometimes it’s so sharp. It was prescient and strange and new. The critics tended to like it, but it crapped out in theaters and didn’t stick around long. Jerry Lewis was more of a draw for irony-laden hipsters and not the mainstream in 1982. And it was the third movie of this recognizable type, after all, which might have smelled formulaic, especially by those roiled up about the violence of Taxi Driver and Mean Streets. But in 2024 The King of Comedy feels glowingly fresh, with a round robin of great performances adding up to a mystifying spectacle that is strange and wonderful.
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