Cinema Seminar:
The King of Comedy

Taught by Paul Wright, Ph.D.
Instructor of English and History, Main Line Classical Academy

In 1967, Time magazine quoted artist Andy Warhol as predicting that in the future, “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982) explores the lengths to which people will go to enjoy a fleeting moment in fame’s ever-decaying orbit.

It centers on Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), a frustrated, disturbed stand-up comedian who dreams of a career-launching appearance on the film’s equivalent of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson—in this case, The Jerry Langford Show. When Pupkin fails to leverage a brief encounter with Langford (Jerry Lewis in an acclaimed, dramatic turn) to secure an appearance on the program, he connects with fellow stalker Masha (Sandra Bernhard) in a meeting of troubled minds. They decide to kidnap Langford, the results of which they imagine will be that Masha will date him and Rupert will get his long-awaited shot at stardom.

Much like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver before it, The King of Comedy is a reflection on profound loneliness, but one seen through the warped lens of a rapidly changing media landscape in which notoriety of any kind is the obsessive goal. Forecasting the eventual world of reality television and the “no such thing as bad publicity” ethos of today, the film was initially a box-office failure.

Scorsese, exhausted after the frustrations of New York, New York and the triumph of Raging Bull, made an unsettling film that has only grown in estimation for its prescient insights into the compulsive nature of attention-seeking in the postmodern media ecosystem. In that light, Rupert is not a one-off; rather, he is the shape of things to come.