The King of Comedy

No one can survive becoming a legend. For as long as mankind has crafted stories, created narratives, it has projected legendary status upon its great members. From Jesus Christ to Billy the Kid, from Abraham Lincoln to Alfred Hitchcock, the great members of society have become larger than life, even at times deified. This process took several years, sometimes decades or centuries to do, as word of mouth had to spread, and the stories surrounding them painted pictures that far outshone the actual men. This is no longer the case however. Legends have been replaced by dime-store celebrities, mediocre men looking for their 15 minutes, nobodies scrounging for the limelight. This is the subject of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy.

The King of Comedy revolves around Rupert Pupkin, a wanna-be comedian who is waiting for his big break. He befriends Jerry Langford, a legendary comedian, one of the greats, and convinces him to give Rupert a chance. Besieged by passive-aggressive rejection upon submitting his audition tape, he desperately decides to kidnap Jerry. So he and his fan-girl friend take him hostage and demand that Rupert get the opening spot on the show. Rupert gets up and delivers his series of one-liners, several of which are funny, but none of which are overwhelmingly so. Even though we the audience laugh, there is this lurking suspicion that we’ve heard these jokes before, and that he is bringing nothing to the scene. Was it worth it then to kidnap Jerry Langford? As Rupert says “It’s better to be a king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime.” He is sent to prison, but upon his release publishes a book of memoirs and starts his own show, because in a sense he has become the king of comedy.

In a sense, we would like to condemn Rupert to list him among the mediocre men, to argue that he has no talent. But while he may be mediocre and talentless, those don’t seem to come into play in his apotheosis. He risks everything to become king for a night, and proves that he belongs among the celebrities. Steven Spielberg, for example, walked into Universal Studios one day wearing his father’s suit, carrying an empty briefcase and set up shop in an unused office. And while it took him a while to make films as great as Jaws and Close Encounters, he still managed to become great by subverting the typical paths of rise and fall. Robert Frost famously wrote that when “two roads diverged in a wood…I took the one less travelled by and it has made all the difference.” What if by taking the unused road, by doing something completely crazy and irrational, this is the only way to become great?

While it seems like Rupert Pupkin is one of the afore-mentioned dime-store celebrities, making bank off of a book deal outlining his criminal ascent to stardom, I would posit that he is of the greater variety. He is a legend of postmodernity, a legend that has shifted the paradigm and validated a wolrd in which all can be celebrities. He has taken the road less travelled by; he has reacted to a world that refuses to let anyone out of the caste they are born in. These castes are not made of race or background, but of means to fame. The world would have been satisfied if it had never heard of Rupert Pupkin, if he had remained a schmuck for life, but he refused to allow that to happen. He rose to the circumstance, and in the world of the film, people would talk about him for decades to come, insuring that he would always be remembered as the King of Comedy.