As the title slyly suggests, The King of Comedy is, essentially, about class warfare. Pupkin the Everyman versus The Establishment. It is a peasant revolt against the King – Pupkin’s obsession with fame is driven by economic concerns and fear of anonymity.
Rupert Pupkin is over thirty, jobless, and lives with his mother in her basement. Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis, in Johnny Carson mode) occupies the stratosphere of talk show popularity and a multimillion-dollar mansion. Scorsese frames the basic conflict against clearly established social divisions. Langford's TV studio is a well-guarded castle, complete with armed sentries, a moat of secretaries, and a crystal chamber for the king. It is impenetrable, as Pupkin finds out the hard way. To usurp his power, he needs to forge an alliance with someone from the nobility class.
Enter Masha (Sandra Bernhard, off-the-charts), a spoiled rich brat whose obsession with Langford is strictly psychotic. Her emotionally distant parents gave her financial stability, but were frugal in the love department. Masha stalks Langford not to seek fame and fortune, but to hound basic human affection. Unearned privilege, the film seems to imply, removes one’s perception of reality as the rest of us know it.
The unlikely duo is guided by a common goal but opposing motivations. Scorsese is careful to accentuate the class divide between Pupkin and Masha, frequently separating the two by natural partitions in the frame. The pair masterminds and executes a madcap coup d'état. Initially, it all seems to work swimmingly. But, like all misguided revolutions, the overthrow of King Langford ends in a fiasco. Ultimately, the feudal system regains full control.
The King of Comedy, as all great films do, lays out its message in a breadcrumb trail of clues. The plot is beautifully crafted around Pupkin’s overlapping visions. Scorsese juggles his protagonist’s duality on screen in several scenes – intercutting between real and imaginary actions. While the fairy tale ending is plausible on some level, it works much more poignantly if we assume that Rupert Pupkin achieves fame only in his deluded mind. Scorsese leaves us plenty of hints for this interpretation.
As Pupkin, De Niro is simply phenomenal. It is a tremendously difficult part to play, as Rupert’s redeeming qualities are rather scant. His irrational actions do not inspire our empathy, yet the actor makes him palpably, and painfully, human. Subjected to so much rejection, most of it justifiable, and persevering in his tunnel vision against better judgement, De Niro’s Pupkin is someone for whom we feel embarrassed. In the end, we pity him, as we would a vulnerable friend who lacks self-awareness.
It’s easy to see now why The King of Comedy failed in the first years of the Reagan administration – its textures keenly subvert the get-rich-quick ethos of the day. It is a devastating critique of the system designed for control, not equality. Scorsese and screenwriter Paul D. Zimmerman propose that we exist in a perpetual state of delusion: the elite firmly believing in its exceptionalism, and the have-nots hoping that one day the tide will turn in their favour.
Forty years later, with unmerited viral fame seemingly at the fingertips of anyone with a smartphone, the Rupert Pupkins are legion. The delusion, on both sides of the divide, is stronger than ever.
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