“Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime.”
Don’t let the title fool you, Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy isn’t all that funny. Well, I’ll take that back. It is funny—every scene shared by uber-famous comedian Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis) and his stalker/imitator/kidnapper Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) is brimming with awkward faux pas, passive aggressive decorum, and dry wit. But this engrossing brand of cringe humor plays second fiddle to the film’s satirical excoriation of celebrity culture. And the self-styled “King of Comedy” is decidedly humorless. In fact, he would be quite pitiable if he weren’t so overbearing.
In his mother’s basement, Rupert, a wannabe standup comedian who has never performed in front of a live audience, has recreated Langford’s television studio set complete with cardboard cutouts of the host and guest Liza Minnelli. He spends his free time down there lost in his fantasies. He imagines befriending Langford, meeting his new pal for lunch, and appearing on his show where he marries his high school crush Rita (Diahnne Abbott).
Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker cleverly alternate between Rupert’s lonely basement monologues and his elaborate visions, often mixing the two to underscore a delusion that is further cemented when Rupert actually meets his idol—by “saving” him from his female counterpart, the equally-obsessed and unforgettable Masha (Sandra Bernhard)—and believes the encounter is his big break. Soon he is a mainstay in the studio’s reception area, where he impatiently waits for an unscheduled appointment with the weary celebrity and pesters his secretary (Shelley Hack). When Langford bluntly rejects Rupert, who has dropped in uninvited at the funnyman’s country home, the spurned wackadoodle takes drastic measures to realize his dream of performing on a primetime comedy show. After all, isn’t admiration usually tinged with at least a little bit of jealousy?
Hanging over the entire picture is the question of whether or not Rupert is in on the joke. Does he actually believe that a chance meeting with a celebrity has led to a genuine friendship? Does he really think his forced charisma and low-brow one liners are the markers of comedic genius? Or is he just so far into his preposterous gamble that he can’t stand the humiliation of dropping the act? In any case, his actions prove that his conception of reality is severely warped. He’s naïve, but cunning, impulsive, but shrewd, and his entire persona—both internal and external—has been formed by the shallow repartee of talk shows. His whole life is an assembly of superficialities.
The King of Comedy may seem like a departure for the Scorsese-De Niro partnership, but it’s not hard to see Rupert Pupkin as a desperate narcissist in the mold of Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta. It’s also not difficult to extrapolate the talentless Pupkin into the present-day and see his likeness in any number of hack celebrities who finagled their way into the popular consciousness.