The King of Comedy (1982)

 

Genre: Crime/Drama

Time: 1h 49mins

Director: Martin Scorsese

Quick Summary: Rupert Pupkin is a passionate yet unsuccessful comic who craves nothing more than to be in the spotlight and to achieve this, he stalks and kidnaps his idol to take the spotlight for himself.

Whilst watching this, I was unsure how to feel about it. Once I finished it, I understood everything.

Mainly, this is about celebrity cult culture and how insane it can be and just how plain disillusioned people are. What I found funny was actually that this film is way more relevant now than it was back when it came out.

Robert De Niro is fantastic in this. A lot of this I cringed, not because of the film, but because of the character he played, Rubert Pupkin, which is exactly how this movie wanted him to be. His character has so many layers, even from looking at the surface. He just wants to get his dream of performing his stand-up comedy in front of a live audience and revolves his whole life around it to get it. Performing to cardboard cutouts, kidnapping a talk show host, constantly pestering tv show companies and just sitting there all day until they see him. It's fascinating how disillusioned this guy is. He refuses to believe he is unfunny and pretends to this woman he is seeing that he is a close friend of the talk show host so he can show up at the guy's house eventually embarrassing her once she finds out the guy has no idea who Rupert is. 

From his view, Rupert thinks as soon as he gets on the show, he'll be famous and that is all it takes. He doesn't see all the hard work it takes, from building up to the bottom. He wants to be instantly at the top. For some reason, this doesn't go into his brain. I found it rather sad to watch as this guy continuously force himself into situations that clearly he is unwanted in, and he just does not get what is happening. He just continues on with what he thinks is happening.

One of the best scenes for me was near the end where we finally hear what Rupert's Stand up is like. It's six minutes of him being purely funny with rather dark comedy that explains a lot about him. Everything makes sense within this. Not only is it impressive being a monologue, but there are no cuts, it's just him purely talking and finally getting what he wants. After this, he is satisfied and allows things (that I won't spoil) to happen now he has finally achieved his lifelong dream. What is interesting, is how much work ironically he did to get there. 

Jerry Lewis plays a brilliant version of himself in Jerry Langford; a famous comic obsessed with his fame, ignorant to his fans. He and De Niro share great chemistry in their scenes together.

Sandra Bernhard also stars, playing Masha; a rival autograph collector of Pupkin, who is also obsessed with Langford. She too shares great chemistry with De Niro, the two of them competing with each other over who knows more about Langford, and who has shared more contact with him. She plays a brilliantly eccentric, almost psychotic stalker, and the scene in which she ties Langford up and forces him to have dinner with her is truly painful to watch. 

The film is occasionally interrupted by scenes which can be only described as dream sequences spawned from Pupkin's wild imagination. These dream sequences, as well as how his jokes deteriorate during his stand-up, give us an idea of the darker side of this film.

Although this is cringe-worthy this means sometimes it is hard to watch some of these scenes out of second-hand embarrassment. This means I lost some interest halfway through before I realised what was going on. Not everyone will like this film, as its humour is way out there and maybe a big old miss to some people.

9/10

" Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime."

"Rupert Pupkin: I'm gonna work 50 times harder, and I'm gonna be 50 times more famous than you.

Jerry Langford: Then you're gonna have idiots like you plaguing your life!"

"Rupert Pupkin: Well I'm sorry. I made a mistake.

Jerry Langford: So did Hitler."