Leave ‘The Comedian,’ Take ‘The King of Comedy,’ Robert De Niro’s Dark Scorsese Satire

Our favorite movies and music we can go back to whenever we want to find comfort, solace or escape. Comedians do that for us, too, in the here and now – although comedy, unlike other performing arts, doesn’t always hold up the same over time. Some jokes reference fleeting fads that make little sense decades later. Some work once or twice but lose their impact upon repeated listening. Some pushed envelopes then, but don’t seem so edgy or revolutionary now that everyone else does it; while others feel outdated or behind the times of current society. With that in mind, we bring you Humor in Hindsight, an ongoing column devoted to stand-up specials, comedy films and documentaries streaming online that, much like wine or cheese, give us more texture and better perspective with age.

Who among us hasn’t suffered from delusions of grandeur from time to time, indulging in fantasies or daydreaming of our untapped potential?

You may even think life itself is a con game.

Have enough self-confidence and who knows what you may achieve! That was part of ��The Secret,” after all, the best-seller that encouraged us to use our own powers of positive thinking to will our best futures into reality. Of course, televised competitions such as American Idol and Last Comic Standing also proved time and again how futile and ripe for mockery that self-confidence becomes when unmatched by talent. Even now, fans of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette watch as much to laugh at delusional romantics as they do to indulge in the fantasies themselves.

In his new movie, The Comedian, Robert De Niro plays an old comic who once was the proverbial king of comedy as a sitcom star decades ago.

It’s a far cry from 34 years ago, when De Niro played Rupert Pupkin, an aspiring stand-up comedian in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. At the time of the film’s release, De Niro and Scorsese already had combined to make the classic films Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, plus the musical New York, New York. For their fifth collaboration, they made this dark satire that holds up much better today than it did when it premiered to mixed reviews in Cannes in 1983.

The film presents a study in celebrity fandom and obsessive behavior in the pre-digital age, with Jerry Lewis portraying a famous late-night TV talk show host named Jerry Langford, Sandra Bernhard as his stalker Masha, and De Niro as the guy who dreams of performing stand-up on Langford’s show.

Fred de Cordova plays the fictional executive producer and gatekeeper for Langford’s show; in real life, de Cordova was doing that very thing for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and every stand-up comedian really could become an overnight superstar if Johnny gave them a thumbs up, or even more so if he invited them over to his couch after their set. Also darkly paralleling the film, David Letterman did have a very persistent stalker in the late 1980s, arrested several times for trespassing, stealing his car and breaking into his home. Even more tragically, the world witnessed the horrors as an obsessed fan assassinated John Lennon in December 1980, and only a few months later, President Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt. Only a few months after that, The King of Comedy began production.

Back in the fictional early ’80s, meanwhile, Pupkin collected autographs of famous actors and actresses outside stage doors, wearing a coat and tie to look like he belonged. That helped Pupkin “save” Langford from the stalker hiding in his limo after one such TV taping, where he finally gets up the nerve to pitch himself as a great comedian guest for Langford’s show. Never mind that Pupkin is only as funny as any random open-mic participant, and may never even have performed his jokes for any actual crowds yet. Instead, he’s built his own version of a TV studio in the basement where he lives below his mother, acting out imaginary conversations with cardboard cut-outs of Langford and Liza Minelli (De Niro’s co-star in New York, New York). The living breathing Langford, however, gives Pupkin some solid, basic advice: “It takes years and years of honing that and working it.” But, Pupkin counters: “I’m 34!” As if he’s too old already.

Pupkin may be the kind of introvert who waited 15 years after high school to finally ask out the girl he was crushing on, but with his comedy career, that single encounter with Langford launches multiple dream sequences in which they’ve become fast friends and colleagues to the point where Pupkin is substituting for Langford as his guest host. When he does get a date with his crush, Pupkin reveals he’s already put his own signature in his autograph book.

“A guy can get anything he wants as long as he pays the price. What’s so funny about that? I mean, crazier things have happened,” Pupkin says. “You don’t understand what a shot on Langford means?”

Some aspects of the cultural climb, and how we praise only to tear down celebrities, appears here to great comic effect.

One scene follows Langford on a typical day walking down the street, where a taxi driver stops to say he should be a guest on Langford’s show, a crew of construction workers cheers just at the sight of him from their project on an office building high above, and an older woman on a pay phone interrupts her conversation to ask him for an autograph. When Langford won’t join the phone call, though? She snaps. “You should only get cancer! I hope you get cancer.”

And plenty of others share Pupkin’s dreams of stardom, or at the very least hobnobbing with the stars. Party crashing is an age-old tradition, we’re reminded.

Except Pupkin is not only delusional, but also dimwitted. “I can take a hint,” he says multiple times, yet never getting it. His grandiose fantasies blur into real-life consequences, particularly when he enlists Masha as an accomplice for his schemes.

The movie proved to be Bernhard’s big breakout performance. By establishing so many dream sequences earlier, Scorsese’s ending to the film leaves us to debate and decide for ourselves whether Pupkin succeeds or fails in his attempt to become a comedy king.

Is it truly better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime?

Either way, The King of Comedy ushered in and influenced an entire generation of anti-comedy, encouraged TV series such as The Office that explored the humor in discomfort and the cringing quiet. And it arrived just as TV itself was beginning to heighten its own celebrity worship through tabloid journalism and infotainment shows such as Entertainment Tonight. All of that, magnified so much more by the Web. Then taken to the extremes by the likes of TMZ.

Now we’re all Masha. We’re all Rupert Pupkin. And as the poster suggested, it’s no laughing matter.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.