Scorsese/De Niro: King of Comedy(Dir. Martin Scorsese, 1h49m, 1982)

Welcome to month two of Scorsese/De Niro, our fifty-plus year, nine film epic adventure, in the company of the greatest Western director/actor of modern times. So far on our journey, we've seen Martin Scorsese come from the streets of Little Italy to critical and financial acclaim, with Robert De Niro in tow, only for drug addiction, and a folly of grandeur to almost undo him, only for the epoch-defining Raging Bull to return the duo to fame and success. This rise and fall and rise again has lasted a breathtakingly short seven years. Over the next five weeks, we'll talk about the other forty-three, from the return to the mob movie that is the legendary Goodfellas (1990), to the off-beat remake of Cape Fear (1991), to the great sweeping crime epics that are Casino (1995) and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).

If there's one limitation to this season, it's that we lose sight of De Niro and Scorsese between these collaborations: eight years, and three films by Scorsese lie between today's film and our next stop on the Scorsese/De Niro express, and ten films in which De Niro acted. We lose De Niro's towering performance in the equally colossal Once Upon a Time in America (1984) and his villainous turn in The Untouchables (1987), we lose the blackly-comic, back to basics After Hours and the arrival of Tom Cruise as critical as well as commercial darling in The Colour of Money (1986), opposite Paul Newman, and of course, the controversial and long-gestating The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

The man who would be king; Robert De Niro as Rupert Pupkin

Before all this, comes King of Comedy, Scorsese's black comedy in which a would-be comedian (De Niro) attempts to befriend, and eventually kidnaps, a television host and comedian (Jerry Lee Lewis), for his chance at fame. This is, immediately, De Niro as we've never seen him before; when he arrives in Jerry Langford (Lewis)'s limousine, De Niro has disappeared into Rupert Pupkin, an awkward, needy stalker, partially based around De Niro's own encounters with his own (by this point numerous) obsessives, some of whom he confronted before the film began production. Their initial encounter in the limousine, where De Niro introduces himself as a would-be comedian, and where Langford is, unwillingly, confronted by his audience is equally awkward, though, in a bathetic way, there's quite a charm to De Niro.

King of Comedy, certainly, focuses upon fame: there's a later sequence where going for a walk, Langford is confronted by both his fans, seemingly everywhere, and the fickleness and demanding nature of the audience, the latter appearing in a woman who, spurned for a telephone call with her nephew by Langford, immediately wishes death upon him. Pupkin's partner in crime, and his eventual accomplice, Masha (Sandra Bernhard), is a perfect example of this, her first appearance coming in the same sequence that introduces Pupkin, the titles rolling over her positively feral demeanour, trapped in the very limousine she seeks to enter. Against this, Pupkin is, at first glance, an earnest figure, keen to follow his hero into comedy, inspired by his lucky break. Underneath this fanboyish persona, though, is something altogether more unsettling.

A portrait of obsessive fandom

Whilst comparisons are invariably made to Travis Bickle, De Niro and Scorsese's other anti-hero, but aside from both having a tenuous grip on the increasingly blurred lines between their own reality and hard fact, and being emblematic of New York in their respective decades, they have little in common. Compared to Bickle's open hostility and gun-toting sensibilities, Pupkin may seem more genteel; even his kidnapping of Langford, and the prior encounters with the television star and his secretary are largely that of a man forced to extremes and apologetic throughout, whilst De Niro's performance is that of a largely unassuming man, in loud, ill-fitting suits and with a patently ridiculous little moustache. Yet, strip this back, as the film does several times when Pupkin is alone, and he becomes far less charming.

Scorsese reveals this smartly and without fanfare-the film shifts to have Langford and Pupkin sitting together at a restaurant, discussing Pupkin taking the show over for a few weeks; it's only with the interjection of Pupkin's unseen mother (a cameo by Catherine Scorsese) that the true nature of this scene, and Pupkin's delusions, become apparent, as the reverse camera angle reveals the would-be comedian sitting in his basement, among cardboard cut-outs, a shot that is as bathetic as it is faintly alarming-the people who choose to pursue celebrity such as Pupkin and Masha are, in a sense, fantasists, but here Scorsese lays it out in striking visual terms, Rupert later performing his comedy routine in front of a colossal backdrop of an audience.

Playing to a captive audience: King of Comedy is atypical of Scorsese's filmograph

Pupkin's delusions, and those of Masha, once they have kidnapped Langford and Masha is left on her "dream" date, a scene where Bernhard threatens to steal the film, are all encompassing, and, as they become so, so Rupert Pupkin becomes ever more volatile, the blackly comic moments belieing a dangerous man who breaks into the TV station that Langford works in, not to mention his kidnapping. And yet, we cannot help but empathise with Pupkin-his dream may be outlandish, his comedic act poor, his attempts to break into the world of comedy and into fame haphazard and bizarre, and yet he makes it.

King of Comedy's legacy today, though, is far from the most atypical film of Scorsese's filmography-via Todd Philip's Joker, in which the film is haphazardly bolted onto Travis Bickle's narrative arc from Taxi Driver, the film is practically remade as High-Scorsesian melodrama, shorn of its black comedy, and a thankless piece of cinema, a film made by a person who understands Martin Scorsese's oeuvre as masculine ultra violence only. Ignominy of ignominies, De Niro is cast as the Langford-style character, Murray Franklin, having to sit against Joaquin Phoenix gamely doing his best to play Batman's The Joker via 1970s-1980s Robert De Niro.

At least Scorsese, as executive producer, was in on the joke. King of Comedy deserves a better class of homage; it may not be Scorsese's typical fare, but its meditation upon fame and those questing for it certainly does deserve to be counted among his better work.

Rating: Recommended.

King of Comedy is available via streaming on Disney+, and on DVD and BluRay from 20th Century Fox.

Next week, we arrive at Goodfellas, Scorsese's epicly scaled arrival in the 1990s, as De Niro and Ray Liotta star in the best mob movie of all time.

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