“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of, so they can see that it’s not the answer.” – Jim Carrey
“Better to be King for a night, than schmuck for a lifetime.” – Rupert Pupkin, “The King of Comedy”
READ MORE: Martin Scorsese’s ‘Silence’ Reportedly Over 3 Hours Long
Both these quotes are brought up in a recent video essay by Must See Films that looks at the cultural influence of Martin Scorsese’s great and underappreciated black comedy “The King of Comedy.” Of course, one of these quotes is actually articulated by the protagonist of the film itself, played by the director’s longtime muse and collaborator Robert De Niro. Scorsese’s follow-up to “Raging Bull” was deemed a failure upon its release back in 1982: a sort of death rattle for the renegade ’70s film culture that nurtured Scorsese and his peers. Audiences said “The King of Comedy” was too difficult, too sour, that it made them feel uneasy. Since then, the film has grown in stature, and its themes of celebrity obsession and media-induced delusion are more frighteningly prescient today then perhaps they’ve ever been.
READ MORE: The 20 Greatest Music Moments In The Films Of Martin Scorsese
The essay explores many of the thematic through lines that are central to “The King of Comedy.” Although Scorsese’s film is certainly a poem to obsession and isolation in much the same way that “Taxi Driver” is – and there are even times when Rupert Pupkin comes across as a needier, more pathetic little brother to Travis Bickle – one theme that not many people bring up when discussing “The King of Comedy” is entitlement. Pupkin, a miserably unfunny aspiring comic who’s dangerously obsessed with comedy legend Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), feels entitled to success because in his mind, he’s the most charming and hilarious person on the planet, and if anyone should get rich and win the adoration of the public, it should be him. In his own twisted way, he believes he’s earned it. Langford, more intriguingly, feels entitled to privacy. For a wildly successful man, he shows no signs of feeling towards anyone else in his life, and he mostly wants to remain insular, forever pickled in his own bubble.
The film is very much about the public’s relationship to art, so it makes sense that the video takes time to explore the movie’s most prominent theme: our desperate and often ugly fascination with fame. Pupkin’s “king for a night” quote gets a bitter laugh in the movie’s closing moments, but it hints at a much more disturbing truth: that fifteen minutes of fleeting fame might be preferable, for some people, to an entire lifetime spent as a loser. The essay also takes time to examine the movie’s often intentionally rocky transitions between Rupert’s detours into self-serving fantasy and the awfulness of his reality, exemplified by moments like the movie’s unsettling make-believe wedding sequence or the drawn-out sequence where Pupkin crosses the ultimate line by breaking into Langford’s home.
Looking at the film now, it’s not exactly hard to see why it flopped. Pupkin may be Scorsese’s most off-putting creation, which is really saying something. He’s vain, pushy and completely oblivious to social cues. Making the film was apparently so emotionally taxing that Scorsese and De Niro didn’t work together for another seven years after production wrapped. And yes, the film is often painful to watch, but that is what makes it essential. “The King of Comedy” is important cinema because it implicates the viewer as far as our relationship to the art we consume. It forces us to reflect on parts of our personality we may not be entirely comfortable with. The movie’s hair-raising “comedy” has been an influence on everything from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s “The Office” to the work of writer/director Jody Hill (mainly his mall cop psychodrama “Observe and Report”) and after all these years, Scorsese’s film remains a biting and vital commentary on the twisted American thirst for success.