Delayed Reaction: The King of Comedy

The Pitch: It's Travis Bickell, but not as violent, but maybe more dangerous, but in a comedy movie, but a black comedy with no laughs.

An aspiring comedian and obsessive fan kidnaps his favorite late night show host in order to arrange his big break.

One of my least favorite phrases, in general as well as about movies, is "ahead of its time". I hate when people talk about things as prophetic or "ahead of their time". I have a long list of reasons why this annoys me. I'll try to keep it short. Especially in hindsight, people like to rewrite history. The one I always point back to is Network. That movie isn't some brilliant look forward at the way that news and entertainment were going to converge. It's actually about a topic as old as time: people would rather be entertained than be informed. That's never been a new topic. It happens with every medium change. Newspapers said it about TV. TV networks said it about cable news. Cable news says it about internet news. This goes back to "yellow journalism" a hundred years ago. Hell, I'm sure Romans watching an event at the Colosseum were talking about how it was numbing their brains. Network is just a reflection of the same thing that every generation says about the next generation. It's a movie about its time, and the future, and the past. The specifics of the movie are circumstantial.

I bring this up, because I can fall victim to it too. Watching The King of Comedy, my first thought was to praise it for how forward-thinking it was about celebrity worship culture. It's really not looking ahead though. It's a reflection of its time. The crazed fans and stalkers were already a thing in 1983. It's much different now. It's easier to follow celebrities these days, meaning there's less separating the crazies from the celebrities. The King of Comedy only even applies to the present in the broadest strokes. A man wants fame without putting in the work. A man gives into all his delusions. A man takes extreme measures to get noticed. All of this is universal, although technology has made it all even easier, which some people mistakenly call "prophetic".*

*A good analogy is when people think police brutality has gotten a lot worse more recently. No. It's been that way for a long time. It's just easier to record and upload the evidence of it now.

The King of Comedy is one of those movies that has been circling me for a while. My specific set of podcast subscriptions has it so that it's constantly mentioned, be it the 80s movie podcast, the film nerd podcast that loves Scorsese, or any number of podcasts hosted by comedians who relate to elements of the movie. I knew that I needed to look out for Jerry Lewis' and Sandra Bernhard's performances in particular. I did come to it fairly blind to what actually happens.

Indeed, Lewis and Bernhard are terrific. I haven't seen many Jerry Lewis films, but I know that I shouldn't expect him to be this restrained in anything else. Bernhard simply never got another role this good. I'm more torn about Robert De Niro's Rupert Pupkin. He's almost too precise as a character. Pupkin is the kind of person I don't see existing in the world before the beginning of the movie. I feel like it's missing something in the first five minutes to explain him. And De Niro doesn't disappear in the role as well as he does in others. I like the character more than the performance.

I unequivocally love the ending though. It took me by surprise. Is it real? Is it a fantasy? I don't know. All movie long, Scorsese slips into Pupkin's fantasies seamlessly, so there's nothing on the screen to tell the audience. It's up to each of us to decide. You can probably learn a lot about a person's worldview by how they read the ending. Personally, I bought into it as it was happening, but about a minute later I decided it was in his imagination. It's all a little too perfect to believe it's real.

The climactic stand up set is a thing of beauty as well. It's just good enough to recognize that Pupkin has talent but rough enough to show that he's not a polished professional. The material is mostly generic, but the occasional joke clues us into enough of his backstory to explain how he got like this.

It's in the category of movie that I don't enjoy watching, per se, because it's all about awkward people doing uncomfortable things. That's just not the kind of movie I like watching. I'm not about squirm humor. This is yet another testament to the versatility of Scorsese.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend