Review of The King of Comedy (1982) by Burton M — 07 May 2009

This is Taxi Driver re-imagined as a comedy of manners and it?s a terminal, spastic piece of cinema, cynical in the extreme and intent on making its audience squirm. I love it! It?s a dark portrait of passive hostility and of a culture that has lost all sense of priorities and values, and it seems more prescient with every passing year.

In Scorsese?s eyes we are all Rupert Pupkins, and the motto ?I?d rather be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime? prophetically sums up the direction in which television culture would go over the following decades.

Jerry Lewis is cast wonderfully against type as a self-serious, humorless grump; Sandra Bernhard is volatile and appropriately excruciating; and it?s probably the last movie in which De Niro really made an effort.

Now that Scorsese has presumably got the Oscar chasing out of his system, I?d love to see him make another black comedy like this.