Mad about Jerry

The King of Comedy 1982 (109 minutes) directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Paul D. Zimmerman.

Here’s a proposition: if comedy is a means for conveying insight by converting the heat of anger into the light of humor, cast an actor noted for angry roles as a wannabe comedian desperate for celebrity.

Voila! Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver becomes Rupert Pupkin, self-crowned King of Comedy, whose every misbegotten, self-absorbed line is a hostile self-laceration: ‘Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime.’

But that’s not all. Cast a genuine king of comedy—Jerry Lewis—as Jerry Langford, the comedian whom Pupkin idolizes and wants to be. Take this old pro and throw him in a pot with De Niro the intense method actor and an equally intense and aggressively offensive comedienne—Sandra Bernhard—and see who lives to tell the tale.

It’s that rough. But seriously, folks, the result is funny, and scary, at times outrageous, and about as mad as a hatter gets.

The plot is straightforward: a star-struck fan will do nearly anything to appear on a national television show.

Pupkin succeeds through dogged and aggressive persistence to speak privately with Langford for several minutes about appearing on Langford’s nationally broadcast nightly celebrity talk show: ‘My name is Rupert Pupkin. I know that doesn’t mean much to you but it means an awful lot to me.’

Langford as though takes a breath in pause. He then calmly explains to Pupkin that entertainment may be a ‘crazy business’, but that it has ‘ground rules’ like other businesses and that ‘you don’t walk on to a national show without experience.’ Then he says several insincere and noncommittal things to brush off the stranger groupie who forced his way into Langford’s limousine.

But Pupkin’s initial presumption takes on grandiose proportions in his own mind concerning his ability and his relationship with Langford, in part due to the inability of Langford and his staff simply to give Pupkin a direct ‘no’. The rejections Pupkin gets through Langford’s staff invariably are dressed in upbeat but insincere encouragement, which only fuels Pupkin’s delusions, and takes him out to Langford’s home in a leafy, affluent suburb of New York City in one of the films many memorable scenes. 

Pupkin lands at Langford’s country villa with Rita Keane (Diahnne Abbott) a woman he knew from high school whom he is trying to impress. He tells Rita that Jerry invited them to spend the weekend with him and ‘other guests', and that he and Jerry are going to work on material for his appearance on Jerry’s show. Pupkin invites himself in and makes himself at home, ‘freshening up’ and pouring drinks for himself and Rita before the panicked eyes of a household staff trying frantically to reach Langford on a golf course in the days before cell phones to find out who Pupkin is and what he is doing there.

Lewis is a great comedian; he is not a great actor. As a director of method actors, Scorsese reportedly left Lewis in the dark about a lot of what was going on in order to try to capture the real irritation and aggravation a celebrity like Lewis—or anyone—would feel were this an actual situation. It is hard to say what conveys Langford’s outrage and anger so well in this and other scenes. For one, it’s visceral, beyond acting. The look in his eyes and gestures could be acting. Maybe it’s the uncomfortably longish pauses in which one can sense his heartbeat race or feel the hair rise on the back of his neck, though the pauses could be just editing. Whatever it is, it works well.

At the same time, Langford/Lewis manages to keep his cool, which is interesting; self control is the only power that this man used to being in charge has in a situation that is not just intensely hostile or offensive, but entirely out of his control.

Frank Sinatra reportedly was considered for the Langford role. Sinatra was a good actor, though it may be a good thing it was Lewis instead.

Pupkin’s mounting frustration at his increasingly hostile and unsuccessful attempts to contact his new friend ultimately lead him and Masha (Bernhard), a creepy celebrity stalker, to snatch Langford off the street and hold him hostage in Masha’s apartment in order to get Pupkin on the show.

‘Why didn’t you just listen to the tape when I asked you to?’ Pupkin remonstrates with Langford. ‘I mean, it wasn’t that hard, was it? A few minutes of your time to listen to something I’ve worked on my whole life?’

This and Pupkin’s other lines would convey something completely different, were the actor delivering them an actor like Tom Hanks. The character’s inner decency and goodness would shine forth and make a stony-faced pro reconsider and give him a single shot that would turn in to a life-affirming moment and not leave a dry eye in the house. But this is not Hanks and Spielberg; it is De Niro and Scorsese.

Bernhard’s scene in her taper-lit apartment with the ‘tied-up’ Jerry is in the same vein—about three parts mad desperation masquerading as star-struck lunacy to four parts intense hostility pretending to be comedy improvisation, which includes taunting and haranguing Jerry, crooning ‘Come rain or come shine,’ and taking off her dress.

‘Celebrity’ used to be much harder to achieve, especially when one had to negotiate a system run by people like Langford. These days, YouTube is clogged with those who would pull practically any stunt to win instant celebrity. This is the only sense in which this movie is dated.