Review of The King of Comedy (1982) by Christopher A — 15 Nov 2013

Martin Scorsese is master crafting more masterpieces than I imagine anyone else making. This movie just brings you back to the times when De Niro starred in great movies and totally placing himself in the position of the character he's playing and making sure we realize that he is not just playing himself each movie. This movie he gets absolutely scary. It has a comedic undertone and sort of a sympathetic one, even if this guy is absolutely insane and doesn't even know it. With this exceptional performance, he makes the movie totally unnerving.

Our main character, Rupert Pupkin, happens to meet Jerry Langford, who's a popular talk show host who feels losing a bit, on the way out after the show. They share a limo together and Pupkin soon thinks he and Jerry are friends and he continually tries to get himself on his show through all sorts of ways.

This movie has plenty of funny gags and all, but it's all about the character of Rupert Pupkin. Without him and Jerry Lewis, the movie would completely fall apart. The funniest part has to be when Pupkin gets confronted by the police, because he actually thinks he won't go will jail and he will do his stand-up routine if he tells them where he captured Jerry Lewis. Awkwardly, Scorsese makes this the one of the most unnerving parts. He's such a sympathetic character for being such a psychopath and Scorsese does this all funny scenes in the movie. It's done so brilliantly that I can't put it into words. The final part of the movie almost had me looking away from my computer screen. It was so hard to watch in the best way possible.

I haven't talked about a lot of the casting yet. There's only three main characters, those being Pupkin, Rangford and an obsessed woman who wants to love Rangford. Scorsese has almost always casted every guy character in his movie correctly. I've always thought he's had a problem selecting his female leads. While Cybill Shepherd was great in Taxi Driver, Cameron Diaz was horrible in Gangs of New York along such lines as Leo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis. The main female lead here didn't have a lot here except some satire of celebrity obsessed people. Jerry Lewis plays his role really good here. His facial expressions are amazingly funny and what he has to put up with this movie just makes his down to Earth portrayal just that much better.

This is without a doubt one of the most underrated gems of all time and I am very reluctant to give it a 10/10.