King for a Night: ‘The King of Comedy’ (1982)
“Barbra is hard to work with.”
When the writer Paul Zimmerman heard this, coming out of the mouth of a panel guest on The David Susskind Show, he knew he’d gained a glimpse into a strange psychological realm. The person making the remark, you see, had never even worked with Barbra Streisand; he was a serial autograph-seeker who’d been asked to leave Streisand alone. Considering this bit of lunacy a little closer, Zimmerman came to recognize just how much the obsessive fan has in common with the assassin, both of whom “rise out of the crowd to make contact in an instant.” A film critic at the time for Newsweek, Zimmerman thought he just might have here the beginnings of a work of prose fiction.
He made his protagonist an aspiring comedian, someone burning with a pathological ambition to become the next King of Late Night, a la Johnny Carson. (Zimmerman was also inspired by a magazine piece on a man who obsessively chronicled every episode of Carson’s The Tonight Show.) After Zimmerman wrote the novel, and after the novel went unpublished, Zimmerman reworked the material into a screenplay, which made it into the hands of Robert De Niro.
All those problems the movie’s eventual critics would have with the relatability of Rupert Pupkin — these were not problems at all for De Niro, who could relate perfectly well to someone driven crazy by his own overweening ambition, and by the rejection with which such ambition inevitably collides. Scorsese, though, didn’t get it at first. “It seemed like a one-joke movie,” he’d remember later. Several years on, however, by the time De Niro was dangling the script in front of him again, Scorsese realized that “it wasn’t about kidnapping, it was about rejection.”
Of course it was, at some level, about kidnapping, insofar as Pupkin and his accomplice — Masha, played marvelously by Sandra Bernhard — attempt to kidnap Lewis’s Jerry Langford and hold him for ransom, the ransom being a piece of Langford’s stage and audience. Going through the original reviews of The King of Comedy, one is struck by how often critics seem compelled to make excuses for the movie, or how they provide a set of instructions on how to unlock its value and make the experience worthwhile — on how to scale its barriers to entry. It’s hard to hold these reviewers in contempt when you consider Scorsese’s own difficulty with the material.
That difficulty, by the way, would change shape completely, as it went from unpenetrable, for Scorsese, to something that penetrated all too deeply. Talking with Richard Schickel decades later, Scorsese said he hadn’t seen the film since it opened — said the prospect of doing so was “very unsettling.”
So it’s no surprise that he told Roger Ebert something similar just after King’s release: “The amount of rejection in this film is horrifying. There are scenes I almost can’t look at. There’s a scene where De Niro is told, ‘I hate you’ and he nods and responds, ‘Oh, I see, right, you don’t want to see me again!’ I made the movie during a very painful period in my life.”
By the end of the interview, Scorsese is confessing to Ebert that both major characters remind him of himself, at two different stages of his career: when he was looking for a break, and when he was trying to fend off those looking to him for a break. “Last night,” Scorsese says, launching into a story as hard to forget as it is to believe,
I went to the ten p.m. show of King of Comedy. On the screen, the scene is playing where Rupert pushes Jerry into Jerry’s limousine and says he’s gotta talk to him. He’s out of breath. “Take it easy, kid,” Jerry tells him. Meanwhile, in the back row of the theater, a kid grabs me by the arm and he’s saying he’s got to talk to me. He’s out of breath. I tell him to take it easy. It’s the exact same scene that’s on the screen!
Feeling much closer to the material than Scorsese, De Niro was protective of the project. This protectiveness manifested in De Niro’s doubts about casting Lewis as the lead. De Niro believed, not without reason, that Lewis would get in front of the camera and be his regular old spastic self, insufferably asinine and sophomoric. “He…has to do it straighter than he’s ever done anything in his whole life,” De Niro wrote the director in a memo.
That was certainly true, but Scorsese knew Lewis could do it. Scorsese understood what age and experience and pain — psychic, physical, emotional — had done to Lewis’s temperament and demeanor. Scorsese was able to see the seedy weirdness even in something like Lewis’s annual telethon for muscular dystrophy:
With its combination of money pouring in for charity and its Vegas sensibility, [it] seems to verge at times on nervous breakdown. Also the thin line between reality and drama seems to be shattered constantly. Anyone who could conjure up and sustain this atmosphere is quite extraordinary.
After meeting with Lewis a few times about the role, Scorsese recalled, “I could see the man was ripe for it.”
It’s fun to wonder what Dean Martin, also considered for the part, would have done with it. Having been Lewis’s straightman during all the years of their comedic partnership, how would he have compared now that Lewis had mellowed and matured into a credible straightman himself? Would he have been even more commanding? We shouldn’t take it for granted, for Lewis now carried, in addition to his mellowed-out maturity, a palpable nasty edge.
Peter Bogdanovich, as usual, was way out in front of things cinematic when, in 1962 on assignment for Esquire, he asked Lewis if he would ever take a dramatic role. “Why?” Lewis replied, indignant. “Five-thousand people are far more capable of it than me. Why should I compete with them? But there’s only eight guys who do what I do. Ha-ha-ha, that’s my responsibility. Why should I do Sammy Glick or something like that? For what? So dat four Park Avenue dames can go see it and say, ‘Didn’t I tell you, John?’”
It gets better. In the very same profile, Bogdanovich is talking with Frank Tashlin, director of Lewis in six of his early comedies, and Tashlin says, “Jerry hates to do serious scenes. I think he’d rather jump off a bridge to get a laugh.” Three years later, in 1965, Lewis would get a laugh by double-somersaulting off a piano on The Andy Williams Show; what he got in addition was a back injury requiring Percodan for pain. The Percodan became a six-a-day habit. On his 29th wedding anniversary, several years later, Lewis went into the bathroom and stuck a .38 in his mouth.
I cocked the hammer. I was ready to go. All the pain, all my troubles, would vanish. I sat there like that for what felt like forever. Then, through the door, I heard my boys, running and playing somewhere off in the house. I took the gun out of my mouth and locked it back in the drawer. I would struggle along somehow.
But there was still plenty of pain to come.
This isn’t the only way for a comic actor to become a dramatic actor, but it’s certainly one way.
De Niro did his character research on a much tighter schedule than Lewis, pulling one of his all-time method-mad immersion stunts. “Bobby developed a technique. Role-reversal!” This is Scorsese, breaking it all down with his highly communicable enthusiasm. “He would set about chasing autograph-hunters, stalking them, terrifying them by asking them tons of questions.” One of them was a guy who’d been stalking De Niro for years. He took the guy to dinner; asked why he’d been stalking him, what he wanted. “To have dinner with you,” he said, “have a drink, chat. My mom asked me to say hi.” It was just as casual as that, and as terrifying.
The King of Comedy knows how to take the innocent and make it terrifying — or how to take the seemingly innocent and make it terrifying. Rupert’s invasions of Jerry’s privacy are so innocuous at first. When he gets into Jerry’s cab at the start of the movie, Jerry believes that Rupert has really saved him from a crazy woman, not even suspecting that the crazy woman is Rupert’s friend Masha, a plant. For primo passive-aggression, I’ve always been partial to Rupert speaking with the harried producer’s assistant at the Langford Show offices. When she tells Rupert his material’s just not strong enough, he asks a variation of that question beloved by support staff everywhere: “Are you speaking for Jerry?”
Even more psychologically raw than the celebrated scene of Rupert showing up at Jerry’s house uninvited is the fantasy sequence in which Rupert imagines Jerry responding with zealous enthusiasm to the demo tape of material recorded in his mother’s basement. I say it’s more psychologically raw because of its queasy intimacy, as forbidden-private as the space in one’s own head. They’re at dinner, and Jerry is telling Rupert all about this special gift of his:
At least once in his life, every man is a genius. I’ll tell you something, Rupe: It will be more than once in your life for you, because you’ve got it. From what I’ve heard here, yeah, you’ve got it — and you’re stuck with it. If you wanted to get rid of it, you couldn’t. It’s always going to be there. I know there’s no formula for it. I just don’t know how you do it. And I’m not curious, mind you, because I want to use the material. I’m curious because I don’t know how you do it. I really have to ask you that. How do you do it?
It’s a hell of a thing to hear, so discordant with the reality of Jerry’s complete contempt for Rupert and indifference to his comedy. But there’s something in Rupert’s answer to Jerry’s imagined question — How do you do it? — that provides a key to why he does it: “I think it’s that I look at my whole life, and I see the awful things in my life, and turn it into something funny.”
Scorsese has said that it was “a very arduous process” for all involved in preventing Rupert from seeming too pathetic or grotesque. It’s not a task one envies. If the filmmakers succeeded — and I believe they did — it’s through moments like these, in which we glimpse Rupert’s vulnerability and are allowed to empathize. But there’s something else, too — something also relevant to this moment of the movie, and something that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough. When Rupert takes those awful things in his life and turns them into something funny…they really are funny.
Well, most of them are — just funny enough, at least, to reward the whole risky enterprise of actually showing Rupert performing his material. The style is classic Catskills: setup, punch; setup, punch. “I was born in Clifton, New Jersey, which was not at that time a federal offense.” What follows are a few more Jersey jokes, some of which double as growing-up-poor jokes, which in turn provide the segue to unhappy-childhood jokes. This is where the material finds its glinting sharp edge, and where the performance becomes disturbingly dark.
It happens suddenly, sneaking right in behind a disarmingly cheesy joke about what he’d say to his mother if she were only here today (“Hey Ma, what are you doin’ here?! You’ve been dead for nine years!”). He makes an innocent-enough joke about her alcoholism, then follows it with a sledgehammer to the solar plexus: “Once, they picked her up for speeding. They clocked her doing fifty. All right, but in our garage?” This receives not only hearty laughter but sustained, appreciative applause.
Following this are trauma-exploiting jokes about his father’s own alcoholism, his childhood bulimia, being abused when not neglected by his father, his sister being sexually abused by their father, his sister’s resultant turn to lesbianism, and being bullied at school — each joke as psychologically searing as the one that preceded it. And yet the audience laughs heartily at these, too. So it’s little surprise that they start cracking up when he tells them that he’s been allowed to perform tonight only because he’s got Jerry tied up somewhere. They think this whole thing’s just been harmless shtick, but we know it’s straight autobiography.
The audience can’t fathom this kamikaze course to fame; can’t imagine the desperation that would compel someone to spill the trauma and drama of his own life on television, committing several state and federal felonies to do so, just to get a shot at national fame — to become, in Rupert’s phrase, king for a night.
“Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime.”
That’s what he tells the audience, and they all just laugh right along with it. They think he’s joking, but as he tells them, “Go ahead and laugh — thank you, I appreciate it — but the fact is, I’m here. And tomorrow you’ll know that I wasn’t kidding and you’ll think I was crazy.”
After his set, the police arrest him, as arranged; before taking him to the station, they stop by the bar where Rita serves drinks, so Rupert can show her the taped program and she’ll know he’s made the big-time. It would be inaccurate to call Rita the love interest of the piece, since what Rupert feels for her is far from love. It’s not even lust, not even fondness, not even sympathy. He covets her now because he coveted her in high school, and, as with so much else he coveted back then — back when he was shunned, disdained, and ridiculed by everybody from classmates to school administrators — Rupert seeks a corrective.
But of course a corrective for such things is impossible. Watching Rupert discover this, over and over and without really discovering it, is the true source of pain in the movie. There’s that excruciating fantasy sequence in which Rupert imagines his eventual marriage to Rita. Not only does the marriage occur as a surprise segment on The Jerry Langford Show (and anyway, who has surprise weddings?), but Jerry has brought out a surprise guest to officiate: Rupert’s old high-school principal, who during the ceremony begs Rupert’s forgiveness for never believing he’d amount to anything. It’s fucking sick.
When Rupert takes Rita out on a date, he has open opportunity to score — she likes Rupert, invites him upstairs for coffee when he drops her off. But Rupert is so pathologically obsessed with impressing her as a comedian, he can’t bring himself to care about sex, even with a beautiful woman he’s long idealized. He’d rather make a date to take her to Jerry’s place, for a party that doesn’t even exist. When they show up uninvited, and Jerry is called in by the butler to set things straight, Rita is much more embarrassed than Rupert could ever be.
Scorsese made King under serious bodily duress. All the labor he’d just put in on Raging Bull — labor fueled by heavy doses of cocaine, to which his lifelong asthma responded poorly — left him weak and exhausted before shooting even started. “Physically I didn’t feel ready,” he’s said. “I shouldn’t have done it and it soon became clear that I wasn’t up to it. By the second week of shooting I was begging them not to let me go on. I was coughing on the floor and sounding like a character from The Magic Mountain.” (Scorsese always has been good for an esoteric literary reference. Or is he referring to the film?) “Finally it got so bad that some days I wouldn’t get there until two-thirty in the afternoon.”
Many have observed that the movie doesn’t feature the flamboyant cutting and camerwork for which Scorsese was already famous. Flat, matter-of-fact — the camera is defiantly deadpan. This affectless quality, though apparently unintentional, certainly makes the movie more effective than it otherwise would be, for the way it puts all the ridiculousness in stark relief.
Some of the scenes were shot in true verite style. Like Jerry strolling up 57th Street, hastily but not urgently, on his way to the office. The New Yorkers who address him on that stroll are not all actors. The construction workers, for instance. They whistle and applaud and yell, “Hey, Jerr-ay!” and “Hey, Jerr-ay!” and “Hey, Jerr-ay!” and even something different, although unfortunately it’s inaudible. These are what you might call accidental-on-purpose extras, their participation expected but not planned. Originally, the Jerry Langford character was supposed to be named Robert (!), but Lewis had some persuasive reasoning for making him Jerry:
I said, “Marty! We’re going to be shooting in New York, Marty. Do yourself a favor and call him Jerry Langford.” He said, “Why?” “Because everywhere we go in New York, your construction workers and cab drivers will validate that it’s Jerry.”
And then there’s that lady who’s rebuffed by Jerry when she asks him to say hi to her friend on the payphone, then yells, “You should only get cancer! I hope you get cancer!” She was in the script, but only because the incident really had happened to Lewis, on one of Manhattan’s many Mean Streets.
Lewis and De Niro weren’t the only brilliant casting choices. Sandra Bernhard at the time was a complete unknown outside of L.A. comedy clubs. Scorsese and De Niro, on a tip, caught her act one night, and, following that, auditioned her in New York. Her fearless, zany sort of assertiveness was somehow enhanced rather than diminished by the awe she felt for Lewis, who intimidated her in their first meetings together. “He’s one of the only showbiz people I’ve met,” she recalled, “who really has an aura.” It was important she felt this awe, since the character of Masha required that she be both defiant toward and intimidated by Jerry’s stardom.
Few could have predicted what a star Bernhard would become, but even fewer could have predicted the cult stardom of a literal background character, the guy making faces in mockery of Rupert as he talks with Rita at the restaurant. Rupert’s trying to impress her, as usual, this time showing off his autograph book, offering his thoughts and opinions on the stars therein, and sharing his (no doubt imagined) personal interactions with them. (“Woody Allen. He’s a very nice guy. He’s a personal friend of mine.” “Of course he is.” “Ha ha ha ha. No, he is.”)
By the time he rips his own autograph out of the book and magnanimously presents it to her, Rita’s become exasperated by this all-too-characteristic performance. Meanwhile, the guy in the cheap seats is loving it. He begins making mock-grandiose arm and hand gestures as Rupert begins to conclude his spiel with promises of an impending appearance on the Langford Show. “A guy can get anything he wants,” he tells her earnestly, “as long as he pays the price.” He tells her, too, about all that awaits the comedian who lands a guest spot on Langford’s late-night program. “That’s coast-to-coast national TV, a bigger audience than the greatest comedians used to play to in a whole lifetime — a shot at a free ticket on the comedy circuit, a comedy show of my own: The Rupert Pupkin Show. Everything!”
Perhaps due to the scene’s legendary status among a certain breed of filmgoer, the remainder of the scene is now available on DVD reissues. There, we can see the lecherous fellow after he absconds to the payphone, where Rita meets him and, yes, he actually picks her up. Whether this part was cut for plausibility concerns or because it made Rupert too sympathetic a character is anyone’s guess. Anyway, we’ll see this guy again, as Morris Kessler in Goodfellas, wherein he ultimately receives his just due at the hands of De Niro — and what’s more, he’s on a payphone when it happens.
Everything about Pupkkn seems somehow contrived and affected rather than the expression of an authentic self, up to and including the mustache, as well as those embarrassingly garish suits, pure product of show-biz sleaze and cheeze. You might even say he resembles a mannequin.
This would make sense. When Scorsese went along with De Niro and costume designer Richard Bruno to all the Broadway clothing stores, they stopped at this one outfitter near the Stage Deli — Lew Magram, “Shirtmaker to the Stars” — where they beheld a display mannequin that seemed an unimprovable realization of their ideal. “[T]he mustache, and the hair, the suit, the tie, shirt, shoes, everything,” Scorsese remembered — “Rupert was looking at us. If you notice, the mustache is slightly shorter on one side. That came from the mannequin.”
For his mannerisms, De Niro went to Pupkin’s creator (or should we say first creator?), Paul Zimmerman, from whom Pupkin copped that “swaying-while-standing-in-place behavior” as well as his rat-a-tat speech pattern,” according to De Niro biographer Shawn Levy, who adds that De Niro “reminded himself to allow nervousness to show through, to add a whine to his voice, to hunch a little like an acquaintance who struggled with multiple sclerosis [did Jerry notice?], to infuse his dialogue with what he called a ‘Jewish lilt.’” Predictably, De Niro pestered Zimmerman to the point that the writer, exasperated, finally exclaimed in a letter, “I HAVE NOTHING LEFT. THIS IS IT….This is all I know about Rupert. This is all you need to know about what I know about Rupert. Shit, you know more about him by now than I do, and I invented him.”
When De Niro finally takes this act to America’s living rooms, at literal gunpoint, one is surprised not only at how good the material and delivery are, but that he did it — that he managed to perform his act live from Langford’s stage. The intuitive impulse is to believe that Rupert, by blackmailing his way onto television, cheated — that he broke the rules, that he somehow cut to the front of the line. But there are no rules, there is no line. The entire history of showbiz has been informed by one driving principle: You gotta do whatever it takes to get their attention. There are no licensing authorities, pharmaceutical screenings, or government-sanctioned protocols. There’s only the simple matter of Are you willing to do whatever it takes? And Rupert, apparently, is willing. Remember what he said to Rita? “A guy can get anything he wants, as long as he pays the price.” Rupert’s willing to pay the price. He earned the right to be king for a night.
