Movie: The King Of Comedy
Director: Martin Scorsese
Year: 1982
Artwork by:  sonderjen
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SPOILERS TO FOLLOW
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The Force of Mediocrity

What does the celebrity have? Fame. Fortune. Glamor. Glitz. High class living and a legion of fans who stampede and claw at each other just for a chance to get a taste of your greatness. The allure of the celebrity is powerful for lots of obvious reasons, and it’s a fairly common dream for someone to want some of that themselves. It’s that dream to be talented enough at something to actually get rich and famous for doing it, and with that comes the love and admiration of all. It’s what they get. It’s what they deserve. Who would think otherwise?

Rupert wants it. He’s gonna get it. Sure, right now he’s just some nobody on the street, but just as soon as Jerry sees his act, then he’s going to arrive. He’s going to be the best there is, and he’s gonna so famous he won’t even know what to do with himself. It’s going to happen. Guaranteed.

Arriving in the early 80’s following some of his greatest hits, Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy was originally seen as something of a mild success. Chronicling the story of wannabe stand-up comedian Rupert Pupkin as he pursues comedy icon Jerry Langford, the movie seemed a much lesser entry compared to Scorsese and Robert De Niro’s earlier iconic collaborations such as Taxi Driver or Raging Bull. As time went on, however, the movie’s power has become more and more recognized, and it is now correctly viewed as yet another striking entry in the director’s masterful filmography. Though it at times is a scathing indictment of celebrity culture and the worship of fame in this country, it’s mainly a troubling character study of a deeply driven, egotistical, and above all, delusional individual. The dangers of stalking and desire come into play as Scorsese looks at how someone can do all that they can to get what they want and what deserving that really means.

The self-titled King, Rupert believes himself to be an excellent comedian. He’s been practicing his material, he’s been working his jokes, and he feels he’s ready to take the step into the big time. Following a taping of The Jerry Langford Show, Rupert, thanks to some assistance from his obsessive stalker friend, manages to sneak his way into Jerry’s departing taxi. From there he chats Jerry up, oblivious to the star’s uncomfortableness, and talks about how great an asset would be if Jerry would just have him on the show. I’m ready for the big leagues, he says, so just give me my shot and we’ll be all good to go. By the time they reach the destination, Jerry, after giving a few tips of reasonable advice (which Rupert brushes off, as it’s all advice that would take a lot of time to implement), tells Rupert to bring some material to his office and see what develops.

From there, Rupert begins his journey of visits to Jerry’s office. Or rather, the reception of the office building, as that’s as far as he makes it most of the time once he’s dropped off said material. But that’s okay! Rupert’s chipper attitude and winning smile carry him through the hours of waiting, even as secretaries, personal assistants, and eventually, security guards tell him it’s alright to leave, because nothing is going to happen right away.

Something happening right away, though, is just what Rupert is after. As he points out to Jerry in the car, he’s already fairly old (or rather, old enough). No time to wait, no time to lose, he’s gotta get big and famous now. His moment has clearly arrived, as far as he’s concerned, so why won’t anyone else see it this way? Rupert’s attitude throughout the movie stays upbeat, but in a way that suggests he’s trying his own patience to wait as a favor to you, and with a grating edge to it at that. Everyone treats him well enough, but too many are simply too polite to forcibly send him away, no matter how much Rupert is clearly bothering them or misreading the situation. Their feelings are lost on Rupert, though, as he’s completely oblivious to all those social signs while being lost in a sense of his own competence.

That’s another real flaw in Rupert’s persona. That he’s actually a fairly mundane, mediocre person. He’s got a crummy job, he’s living in his mother’s basement, he’s still desperately itching to get with the girl he lusted after in high school, and he’s generally going nowhere except inside himself. He occasionally spouts little lines of wisdom that he thinks are profound, but are instead just empty platitudes. And through all this, Rupert doesn’t have a sense of self-awareness. When he gives advice, he leans back with a smug little smile, as if to say whatever he’s just said is the most useful thing in the world. It’s to the point that his ego and sense of self-importance are inversely proportional to his actual abilities.

Here is the real danger in a guy like Rupert. Because a guy like Rupert sees what others has, and assumes that wanting that enough, and putting all his energy towards wanting it, is the same as working hard to actually get it. For him, it’s more a sense of real entitlement, as though the world owes him everything he wants. It’d be a cliché to say it’s a case of him thinking the world revolves around him, and that wouldn’t be true either. It’s more a matter of him realizing that he’s just plain [i[better[/i] than all those other schlubs, so if they’d just get in line with the program everything will finally be fine. He’s so far into himself, even, that his reality is very quickly bleeding into his fantasies, fantasies where he is exactly what he thinks he is.

These fantasies are a key component of the core of Rupert’s identity, shown by way of quick inserts spaced through the movie. They play out like any regular scene would, except now, we’re seeing how Rupert expects things to happen, all as imagine within his own mind. In one he’s having lunch with Jerry, listening to him plead for Rupert to take over the show. For another he’s in a meeting with Jerry in his office, listening to him talk about how amazing Rupert’s material is and how he just can’t understand how he does it. He’s on Jerry’s show, getting a surprise wedding on national television to the girl he’s been pining for. Sometimes the movie flashes back to reality, showing Rupert speaking to himself as he acts out the situation in his head. Or they only show the conversation from reality’s point of view, watching Rupert as he descends into the makeshift TV studio in his basement, complete with a set, an audience spread over the back wall, and cardboard cutouts of TV personalities in the chairs. Rupert comes in and starts chatting away, responding to silent applause from his wallpaper and nonexistent jokes from his two-dimensional co-hosts. Fittingly enough, it’s only his mother calling him to get to work that pulls him away, and even then he takes the time to apologize to the cardboard and bid them farewell.

It isn’t that Rupert is completely crazy. He knows that it’s just cardboard he’s interacting with. This is all just practice for him, and the fact that we mainly see him practicing being famous, rather than actually working on his comedy material, that spells out his actual desires and goals. At the same time, these are still textbook delusions of grandeur, and are still pushing his psyche along down a path that only gets darker the further he goes. As far as he’s concerned, he and Jerry are great friends. He just needs to see Jerry again, and everything will go smoothly.

With these bursts of fantasy, we get a clearer picture of Rupert than he’d every otherwise reveal. In every instance in his head, Rupert is acting humble. He talks with the grace of someone who’s being polite but knows that he’s better than everyone in the room, and knows that everyone else knows it too. Rupert wants to be big. He wants to be better than everyone else, and he wants to do it in a way that still makes him out to be the better man at the same time. Part of it is a general lust for power, but part of it also stems from an unhappy childhood. In one of his daydreams, his old school principal comes on to personally apologize to Rupert for everything that happened when he was younger, to apologize for everything that his peers had done to him, and to general apologize for saying Rupert wasn’t going to amount to anything. The principal, who goes on to officiate Rupert’s dream wedding, even point blank says in the vows that Rupert was right, and they were wrong.

It’s this revenge angle that Rupert is really striving for. He doesn’t just want everyone to know how great he is, he wants to rub their faces in the very idea of it. Wrapped up in his bad suits and big grin, there’s a mean, bitter core of a person who’s full of malicious rage at the rest of the world for not treating him right.

Rupert hints at it here and there outside of his fantasies. When he’s describing how he’s going to get big and famous, and how everything is just going to keep getting better, he mentions what it’s like for those who live in the penthouse apartments: “Way up top, so they can look down at everybody and yell ‘Hey, tough luck suckers, better luck next time!’” He may phrase it like the way that the rich and famous act, but his voice isn’t making it a bad thing. Rupert wants to be there. Even his desire to be a comedian is part of this. Rupert thinks he’s hysterical and witty and charming and everything a good stand-up/talk show host should be, because of course he does. But he doesn’t so much expect people to laugh because they agree with him, he expects them to laugh because he’s the one telling the jokes. By being famous, that’s just something that would be rendered unto him.

A small touch that adds to Rupert’s persona is his carefully catalogued and managed autograph collection. Flipping through it reveals a bounty of signatures from very, very famous individuals, all of whom Rupert is more than happy to point out and talk about as though they’re longtime friends. The pages, blank save for the illegible scrawls (“The more scribbled the name, the bigger the fame.”), are a silent exhibit to the act of being touched by fame. However briefly those moments of contact were, or even if Rupert was there for it (at the movie’s start, there’s a bit where a security guard collects autograph books to take inside for Jerry to sign, cutting fan contact out altogether), there’s still the sense that he figures some of that fame will rub off onto him.

Sometimes Rupert even continues in reality from conversations that only happened in his head, such as when he heads to Jerry’s summer house to hang out with him for the weekend. When Jerry arrives to find Rupert lounging on his couch and his date rummaging around upstairs, he is less than pleased. Jerry does the logical thing, which is get angry that this total stranger has waltzed into his house and starts talking to him as though they were longtime friends, or like Jerry owes Rupert. But Rupert, who’s spent so much of his time molding the narrative of the world around him to fit his own select views, can’t go along with it. It takes a few goes of Jerry telling Rupert off point-blank before the latter gets the hint, and then he opts to just get annoyed at Jerry for being annoyed with him.

It’s a stark case of reality not coinciding with Rupert’s worldview. No problem. He hasn’t been paying much attention to reality before, and he certainly isn’t going to let it start dictating his actions now.

So he kidnaps Jerry at gunpoint. An easy solution to the whole ordeal, really, and it’s got an even easier ransom: let Rupert onto Jerry’s show, and Jerry is free to go. As with most things he does when it comes to the actual execution stage, Rupert manages to be a fairly inept kidnapper. He fumbles the cue cards the cue cards for Jerry to read when he calls the station, he tries to sound much smarter than he his while bluffing a call with the FBI, and he seems weirdly disconnected with the penal future that’s guaranteed to be in store for him whether he succeeds or not. The fact that he’s holding a pistol to Jerry’s head is his only ticket to success. That he leaves Jerry in the care of his friend Masha is the icing on the cake, given how Masha is a complete stalker for Jerry and quite possibly the only person in the movie more delusional than Rupert himself (though if you ask her she’d say she and Jerry are actually in a relationship if only Jerry would finally return her calls). Jerry, wrapped in a duct tape cocoon, manages to remain fairly nonplussed throughout the whole ordeal. Perhaps the absurdity of it all overloaded him a bit.

Here the movie starts to really play with the setting. Jerry’s producers, over the objections of the FBI, actually decide to go along with it. Rupert is going to be on the show. He gets to the set, he idles past security, he meets up with Jerry’s personal assistant who he’d been bothering at the office for the past few days (taking a noticeable amount of pleasure when, upon revealing himself to be the kidnapper, she’s forced to actually go along with him and do what he asks), and gets ready for the show. He’s got his routine all set up. He’s arranged everything with the feds. He’s ready to shine.

We, the movie audience, don’t see the result right away. The film plays coy for a bit about how Jerry’s set went, following him along as he forces the authorities to take him downtown. There, at the bar where the girl he’s after (and who has all but rejected him at this point), he strolls in, flips on the TV, and grins expectedly. Her eyes go wide as she sees him appear onscreen, meriting Rupert another splash of genuine validation. Meanwhile, the movie delivers the perfect punchline.

Rupert’s comedy is alright. He’s got the enthusiastic delivery of an amateur, moving a bit too quickly and not quite nailing the tones in his voice. Here and there he’s got flashes of real greatness, only to carry the joke on a bit. The jokes themselves aren’t anything that special, mostly tired routines based around a cynical upbringing and easy stereotypes (and a few too many lies for comedy supposedly based on true life, given how he jokes about a dead mother despite living in her basement). It’s not that he’s terrible or unfunny, as there’s definitely plenty of chuckles to be had, he’s just not great, like some attempt to delivery comedy in a way that’s similar to a real comedian, but not quite. So-so would be the way to put it. Mediocre is the other word.

It’s Rupert in a nutshell.

And the audience loves it.

The studio audience, at least, loves it. They laugh sincerely at every joke, and cheer at the end. Whether compelled to by those infamous Applause signs, the movie doesn’t say. But they like what they see. They agree with what Rupert had been trying to tell the world the whole time. Back at Masha’s place, Jerry has managed to free himself and get the gun, only to discover that it’s fake. Because of course it is. As Rupert’s set just proved, he doesn’t kill. He just imitates. When Jerry runs outside, he passes by a store where the TVs on display are showing Rupert. Jerry just grimaces at the images, giving the expression of someone who doesn’t want to believe the world is as crazy as it is, but forced to by the evidence in front of him.

At this point Rupert is finally being carted off to jail, and he’s happy to go. As he explained in the final line of his act back on the show, in what might be the one true flicker of genuine self-awareness he has in the entire movie: “Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime.”

The final minute of the movie is a quick montage. Rupert’s attempt to shoehorn himself into the national spotlight did exactly that, putting him on the cover of every magazine and getting him a publishing deal for a tell-all autobiography. He’s released from jail after a short amount of time and quickly given his own talk show. He strolls out center stage to ecstatic applause and a cheery announcer introducing him over and over to an even cheerier tune.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume the finale is all in Rupert’s head. It could be a complete delusion like all the others he’s had, or it could be one final swipe at the vapid and toxic celebrity culture that this country embraces whenever it lets any dedicated nutjob cling to his fifteen minutes. Either way, at this moment, Rupert doesn’t care. He just stands still in the spotlight, beaming up and waving at the crowd while the spotlights glisten in his eyes. His dreams are achieved. He got what he wanted. And he isn’t even a little surprised. Because after all, didn’t he deserve this from the start?

That Rupert ultimately wins is where the true edge of this movie lies. I call it one of Scorsese’s darkest movies, and for good reason, because even if it’s not overtly violent, it is deeply, deeply unsettling. The ugliest of human souls has triumphed precisely because his was so ugly. That is the nature of our society, the movie says. That sometimes wanting something enough is in and of itself enough, talent and hard work be damned.

BONUS ARTICLE BY A BETTER WRITER: http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/06.....king-of-comedy