It's not just the daydream scenarios where he and Jerry are showbiz friends, it's also the basement of his home which is decorated as a mockup of a talk show set, complete with canned applause and laughter and cardboard cutouts of Jerry and other celebrities. And it's also how Rupert keeps turning up to Jerry's offices with audition tapes and waits despite industry standard hints that his quest is futile. He teams up with equally deranged Langford fan Masha for a practical solution involving kidnapping. Will he get his routine to the show?
Undersung in the canon of the Scorsese/De Niro partnership to the point where it is frequently forgotten, The King of Comedy is as energetic and intensely cinematic as any of the others. It's just that it's difficult to reconcile its strange comedy with grave megaliths like Taxi Driver or Raging Bull before and Goodfellas after. Like David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone, fans will on being reminded of it say something like: "of COURSE, completely slipped my mind." But when King is revisited and again proves itself more than worthy and it is because of the comedy.
Comedy? It's about a psycho fan teetering on the edge of ultraviolence. Well, yes, but to get why it is a comedy can take a little switch of focus. There are moments in this film that play more conventionally as comedy but all of them fail, feeling try hard or cute. Mostly, this is a comedy of cringe. Rupert doesn't know that he isn't funny. He has the conviction of a self-help book and the consequent unnerving confidence of the wrong person making up their mind about something for the remainder of their life.
Rupert's socially disastrous behaviour, his incapability to recognise embarrasment in others or feel it himself, and his impulsiveness give him the feel of a Dostoyevsky character, the underground man or Mr Godyalkin from The Double. De Niro's performance shows an unexpected commitment to a character pushing a fantasy version of himself so far forward that his natural self is annihilated. Mr Godyalkin while on one of his self-destructive shopping sprees makes eye contact with his boss as their carriages pass in the street. Godyalkin says words to the effect of: "It's not me. It's someone strikingly like me." If anyone had been hanging out for Scorsese to make an official adaptation of Crime and Punishment or The Gambler they only need to watch King of Comedy for the closest they'll ever get. The comedy is cringe. It is white knuckle and almost entirely unrelieved. When he is making a tape for Jerry in the basement studio his mother, offscreen, yells out for him to be quiet and in the second or two when he has to deal with it the viewer might well let out a loud laugh. Mostly, though, they would be more inclined to watch through their fingers.
Counterbalancing De Niro's force are the dual opposites of Masha the crazy fan (a snakey and effective Sandra Bernhardt) and the post comedy career Jerry Lewis as Langford. Only two years prior to this Lewis had tried to resurrect his gawky clown persona in the repellent, like-punk-never-happened Hardly Working (find the trailer on YouTube and see if you can make it all the way through). While Lewis persisted with similar attempts these eventually faded and he turned his skills to whimsical cinematic landfill like Funny Bones and Arizona Dream.
In the middle of that was King of Comedy is which he plays a man whose tv persona is constantly confused with his offscreen demeanour so much that all he seems left with when encountering his public is anger. A very funny moment in which a fan who pushes her luck in getting an autograph and is refused a further favour turns instantly vitriolic puts Langford's position in a clear capsule. Lewis brings an intensity unknown in any role prior to this and never reprised. As a public figure who hates his public and recognises that his fame forces an endless repetition of the cycle of adoration and hatred, he is a celebrity who has come to understand his own futility. In his one shot, he took the face of the mugging clown with the cartoon voice and showed us the grimace beneath. His every appearance in the film carries tension which was a revelation then and now.
Sandra Bernhardt's Masha is an edgy variable and demonstrates that to take an already volatile film further she needs to be even more unpredictable. This is not in a cute or goofy way but one that grinds up against violence that could take any form. That it's indistinguishable from her sexualised adoration gives it further power and in the two hander scenes with Lewis she suggests the kind of Manhattanite horror figure to be seen later in Wall Street or American Psycho. It was her first screen role with dialogue.
At Griffith Uni in the early '80s, if you took as many cinema courses as they'd let you, you could like any filmmakers you wanted but you had to have an opinion on Godard and Scorsese. Godard's heyday or the years that could be written as seminar papers or assignments were long gone but Scorsese still had decades of forceful auteurism. We happy few who had watched Taxi Driver for the first time on a Steenbeck editing desk (all of us too young to have seen it at a cinema) and Raging Bull on a U-Matic video tape saw The King of Comedy as the next chapter in the canon. We would have been blitzed by the sheer virtuosity of Goodfellas or the depth of feeling in Last Temptation of Christ. Until then, we had some mighty movies from Marty. We couldn't know that his future would be solidly mainstream and have decreasingly sharp edges, that he would become scholarly, respected and dull.
The King of Comedy, meanwhile, did not play like Tootsie or Night Shift (both probably future parts of this series), it played Taxi Driver in pastels and was all the punchier for it. It just wasn't friendly enough to be invited in to the 1982 movie experience, even languishing on the shelves of video shops. I wonder what fans of 2019's Joker would make of a first viewing of King which forms part of the blend used in the later film. Joker's mash of Taxi Driver's proto-incel nightmare and King of Comedy's dangerous delusional fan removed the depth of those and replaced it (knowingly, deliberately) with super villain blockiness. Has that further obscured the source films from contemporary audiences? My hope is that those fans I was just imagining could see King of Comedy just once, knowing when it was made, they might at least admit that it gives Joker some needed context. But I have no idea about that. I can just go back to a banger from an old master and settle in again. Maybe it doesn't matter. No .. it has to.
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