[This is rather casually written. Can’t be so button-down with all these entries. Edits 4/27/16. Edits 4/28/16.]
How I came to this movie—and how I am reviewing it without having seen it closely lately
This is a technically well done movie that, in the 1980s, shortly after it came out, I used to think of as a real cultural touchstone, to the extent movies can be. It was recommended to me by a good friend I had from 1983 to 1985, not a classmate but a coworker when I was finishing up college, named Andy Cohen (who died in 2003 at age 44, after I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since 1986, due to sheer life circumstance for both of us). I think that in 1984, it was playing at the Circle Theater, a revival/festival house in Washington, D.C. (very close to my college), that also showed movies no longer in their first run. The King of Comedy had been released in 1983, but had not done well box-office-wise, so I guess it was already “dumped” into second-run theaters.
Andy was enthusiastic about it; he said it was like a second version of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), and it had all sorts of ironies; for instance, Jerry Lewis, famed for his riotous comedy of decades before, played a perfectly dour straight man here. I went and saw The King of Comedy (KC, hereafter) and esteemed it about as Andy Cohen had. Also esteeming it was another friend, Andy V., who was a housemate of mine in those years (and who has been in touch numerous times since); I think it ran on cable in the multi-tenant house we were renting, and that’s where he saw it most recently before we would make references to it.
In fact, KC made such an impression on me—its main value was in the grand performance Robert De Niro gives as a sort of world-class, increasingly psychopathic banality striving to be a hit of a standup comedian on TV—that I named one character, meant to be an object of derision for its more pitched-satirical parts, in my novel A Transient, which didn’t get underway until 1986. I must have seen KC several times in the 1980s (in the theater and on cable, I think). Then I think it was a long time before I saw it again.
I don’t know if I saw it in the 1990s; I did see it with family in about 2009, on DVD, and I know that was the first time I’d seen it in a very long time. But, for purposes of writing for this blog, I prefer to see a movie by myself, and more than once, and I haven’t been able to do that with KC. In fact, I’ve seen it infrequently enough since the 1980s that I am shy about reviewing it here without seeing it a few times now—because these reviews are meant to convey, along with all else, something of the feeling that you come away from a movie with, and resonances it has with various current events and issues, which a just-done viewing makes most vivid.
So I will write this from (occasionally foggy) memory—and I think the main reason I can get away with that here is that this movie has enough intellectual resonance with me, and enough conceptual strength, that it’s like a great novel you never fully forget—but one to which you would like to return to see how it strikes you all these years later. And I know I don’t have recent enough memory for important details of it.
A rough summary
KC is about Rupert Pupkin, an oddball with nerdy hair and a weirdly prissy manner who fancies himself a comedian, and his dream is to appear on (for the film’s fictional purposes) an analogue of The Tonight Show,in this case hosted by Jerry Langford, played by Jerry Lewis, whose sidekick is Ed Herlihy (the real name of the actor), in place of Ed McMahon. Lewis plays Langford in a perfectly dour manner when the TV host is on off-time—underscoring how even comic public personalities can and must have a sober private life, too.
Rupert, who lives in New Jersey, and lives with his mother (played with ethnically flavored voice by director Martin Scorsese’s mother), practices his shtick in a somewhat spookily decorated studio apparently in his bedroom, and more generally endeavors to try to get a spot on Jerry’s show. He manages to snare himself a girlfriend, played by Diahnne Abbott (who plays a movie-theater concession-stand cashier in Taxi Driver). She is sane enough to, in one instance, berate Rupert for being out of bounds—even a bit crazy—when he takes her to Jerry’s suburban home to try to speak to Jerry, when Rupert is in more of a stalker mode. (This is a turning point in the film—Jerry so holds the line on Rupert’s approaches that Rupert gets more aggressive and deviant afterward.)
Rupert also speaks to an attractive admin at Jerry’s New York studio named Cathy Long, played by Shelley Hack (I had to get these details from the Internet). She is in clearly-to-be-expected running-interference mode for her celebrity boss, as she duly takes Rupert’s cassette tape of his routine, and eventually brings it back with professional apologies, etc. (This admin bears some resemblance, in appearance and vaguely in her role, to the campaign operative played by Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver.)
Rupert is eccentric enough that there is a scene in which he is speaking with his girlfriend in a restaurant, with self-dramatizing gestures that a man in a booth about 20 feet away is watching with relish and starts imitating, mockingly, with almost uncanny timing.
Eventually Rupert reaches a phase where he, along with a wacky cohort (Masha, I find from the Web), played by the unusual comedienne Sandra Bernhard, endeavors to kidnap Jerry—wrapping him up in duct tape in a big mansion—after which Rupert makes a phone call to Jerry’s studio, indicates that Jerry is kidnapped, and accordingly demands that he be given time to appear on the show. Eventually Rupert gets on the show—he is handled by TV professionals at least some of whom are played by people who really are longtime behind-the-scenes mass-media professionals, with muted deep skepticism and otherwise with regard to a crazy needing to be managed gingerly in a tight situation.
Meanwhile, Masha, guarding Jerry, regurgitates her own kooky obsessions to him, while he is pathetically bound up like a mummy in a spooky house. Masha shows her sexual inclinations toward Jerry, and on occasion yells to show how serious she is, and passingly sings like some kind of diva at one point, and generally seems like she’s “on something.” Jerry eventually gets loose enough to grab a gun from Masha and, summarily speaking, put her in her place.
Rupert’s day of reckoning
On pre-taped TV, Rupert does a standup act that is, all things considered, not too bad considering what a noodge he is—though the humor is largely about his life, trying to squeeze jokes out of him as a sort of everyman who has been bullied, marginalized, etc. He is a hit with the audience—and later ends up with his own show, with him focused on in a sultry-lit studio, weird music in the background, his name announced over and over to audience applause, and him waving or such, eventually giving a gesture that seems like that of a priest’s benediction. [Update 4/27/16: I watched this film closely recently, twice, and I found that Rupert, at the very end, doesn't engage in a hand motion that looks like a priestly gesture of benediction, which is what I'd falsely remembered seeing; instead, he looks at the camera, right before the shot cuts away to the credits. What this look at the camera means is open to debate.] (Religious imagery, whether obviously apropos or not, turns up in a number of Scorsese’s films—a topic there’s no time for here. [Added 4/27/16: See, for example, in Bringing Out the Dead [1999] how a situation in which a man hanging off a balustrade, seeming injured in the process, with fireworks going on beyond him, is reminiscent of a crucifixion. See also The Departed [2006] when a man who ends up dead in the bucket of a front-end loader has his arms outstretched, looking as if crucified.])
If some of my details are off, well, that’s my memory.
But you get the point. This is a sort of horror story about a crazy working his way into a position in which to wield power, somewhat like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, but without the murderous mayhem.
How much is fantasy?
Also, just as in Taxi Driver, you don’t know if the scene at the end (with Travis back in his cab picking up the Cybill Shepherd character) is really a dream of Travis’s, in KC, sections are more clearly fantasy, but you don’t always know which. Especially at the end of KC, Rupert being given almost nutty accolades as he’s introduced on his show seems like nothing so much as his own fantasy. We are free enough to infer this idea, since earlier in the movie there are scenes (interspersed with more realistic scenes) that are clearly Rupert’s fantasies of him talking to someone a certain odd way, or interacting with Jerry as a guest on his show. But I remember discussion being made—by Andy Cohen in about 1984 for one, and I think by someone else, too, at my workplace—about how you didn’t know when the overall story of KC shifts over entirely (and as if “not turning back”) into Rupert’s fantasy: is it only at the end when Rupert is seen on his own show? Or does it start as far into the film as when Rupert kidnaps Jerry?
That’s the kind of movie it is—rather high-concept, and if not exactly a sort of anti-hero story, then a sort of study of a psychopath, pretty much in the vein of Taxi Driver. I think just about anyone who has discussed this movie—and likes it—acknowledges its debt to Taxi Driver, and I would say—without denigrating this film—that if it weren’t for Taxi Driver, KC would not exist. In fact, KC’s being a sort of derivative film in this regard tends to weaken its standing as a work of art—say, similarly to a sequel to an esteemed novel, like a sequel to Catch-22 or to Gone With the Wind.
With this in mind, it pays to look at the film for a minute in regard to its main makers’ careers. After that, we will look at the character of Rupert as an echt banality. This will come in Part 2.
