In the clip above, I discuss Martin Scorsese’s riotous, strangely ambiguous 1982 media farce “The King of Comedy.” The title character, Rupert Pupkin (played by Robert De Niro), is a thirty-four-year-old messenger with big dreams. He wants to be a standup comedian—in particular, he wants to perform on the late-night talk show hosted by one Jerry Langford (played by Jerry Lewis), who, with his prestige and comic aplomb, is a counterpart to Johnny Carson. But Pupkin can’t get started.
He lives with his mother in New Jersey, tantalizingly close to the river across which Manhattan’s gleaming power centers loom large, and has turned her basement into his work space—a cardboard-cutout duplicate of Langford’s set, on which Pupkin has placed a couch from which he waxes breezy in imagined dialogue with the stars. Though the plot takes exotic turns toward a kidnap plot that’s intended to get him on the air, the core of the movie is what it takes for an enthusiast, an aficionado, a nudnik to get from zero to anywhere.
Pupkin is a consummate show-biz hack, seemingly born to schmooze, who has honed his routine to a well-oiled patter and his persona to a mask but simply isn’t funny, or funny enough. It’s apt to be thinking about it during the first run of “Black Swan,” for, like Darren Aronofsky’s ballet-world drama, Scorsese’s movie is about an isolated performer whose art is unconditioned by real-world experience. “The King of Comedy” also makes for a useful contrast with, and precursor to, Judd Apatow’s “Funny People,” because both films feature aspiring comedians who go to great lengths to break into the business. But where Apatow’s standup hive swarms with young people who are ready to do any gig for a foot in the door, Pupkin doesn’t wait his turn at open-mike nights (as Langford’s assistant encourages him to do), doesn’t try to write for others, doesn’t have an interest in sitcoms or movies; he wants to be on Langford’s show. He’d (literally) kill to get there, and the mad grandeur of his absurd enterprise has a peculiar philosophical twist: more than to do, he wants to be.
One of the odd lessons that Scorsese offers, in the person of Langford, who (in a deeply moving moment of directorial self-portraiture) is alone in his pristine apartment watching a tape of Sam Fuller’s “Pickup on South Street,” is that nobody is. The contrast between the persona of media people and the minutiae of their life is the chasm that Pupkin doesn’t see, and so, like a cartoon character, he’s able to walk serenely above it—until he falls.