‘The King of Comedy’--A Schnook Goes Off Deep End

The name of the hero in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy� tells a lot about this overlooked gem. Rupert Pupkin . Say it loudly, and there’s kazoo music playing. Say it softly, and it’s still almost like braying.

Rupert Pupkin is the name for a lightweight, a loser, a schnook, a nobody. In this 1983 movie, it’s also the name of a very dangerous guy infected by dreams of celebrity and willing to set his crackpot sights on America’s top talk show host, played by Jerry Lewis as the king of smarmy.

Robert De Niro plays Pupkin, and, as usual, he submerges himself in every little nuance he and Scorsese come up with. There are plenty with Pupkin, who envisions himself as a comic, idolizes Jerry Langford (Lewis) and lives for the chance to make his debut on Langford’s late-night program. But as his dreams of stardom start erupting all through his head, Pupkin pursues Langford with an over-the-edge tenacity, and that’s when De Niro heats up.

It’s a hilarious film and a smart riff on an especially American idea of celebrity, which is basically celebrity as salvation, restorative, blessing. Pupkin sees fame as almost a spiritual state and instinctively knows that it can erase all his sins as a hopelessly inconsequential man.

De Niro bolts from his clenched performance as Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull,� his collaboration with Scorsese before “The King of Comedy,� to give Pupkin a loopy conviction that seems to threaten as we get closer to him. De Niro makes Pupkin a fuzzy kind of nut case. When he chases Langford down, we know it’s the worst invasion of privacy and a clear indication of how unbalanced Pupkin is, but we root for him to win over, or at least take advantage of, this cynical star.

Scorsese and De Niro come at us with wild and then wilder stuff. Pupkin’s fantasies are so developed that he imagines himself being begged by Langford to take over his show for a few weeks. At home, he spends time in the basement chatting with life-sized cutouts of Liza Minnelli and Langford, practicing his hosting shtick. And when in the real world, he schemes to get close to Langford.

After he finally does, and Langford predictably brushes him off, Pupkin teams up with Masha (Sandra Bernhard), another likable goof. They conspire to kidnap Langford, demanding that Pupkin get air time or else. De Niro and Bernhard are great together, complementary pieces in a crazy quilt of fanaticism.

They’re terrific, but Lewis is amazing. Scorsese gets him to play the worst notion of what we imagine the real Jerry Lewis to be, a blatantly self-protective man who knows exactly how to massage and maneuver his public. Lewis seems liberated by diving deep down into this creepy caricature, and you fixate on his every move.