Following a taping of his late night TV talk show, Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis) is mobbed by autograph hounds outside his New York studio. Masha – played with nutty intensity by Sandra Bernhard – jumps into Jerry’s limo. Coming to the rescue is another fan, Rupert Pupkin (Robert DeNiro), who suffers a cut, and uses the injury to solicit a ride with Jerry.

Decked out in a loud polyester suit, Rupert awkwardly claims to be a comedian, and tells Jerry that he’s ready for his big break. “Look, pal. Gotta tell ya, this is a crazy business, but it’s not unlike any other business. There are ground rules. And you just don”t walk onto a network show without experience.” Rupert doesn’t want to hear that, he wants Jerry to listen to his tape. Jerry manages to get rid of the weasel by telling him to call his secretary.

Rupert seeks out Rita (Diahnne Abbott, DeNiro’s wife at the time), a cheerleader he was infatuated with in high school. Rita is sort of intrigued by Rupert’s big talk and has dinner with him. But Rupert is more interested in celebrity, trucking his autograph book along on the date. He returns home to record his horribly cheesy demo tape, with cardboard cutouts of Jerry looking on, and his mom yelling at him to be quiet.

Rupert obsessively loiters around Jerry’s office, until he’s finally notified by his assistant (Shelly Hack) that they don’t think he’s ready for the show yet. Rupert asks to speak to Jerry, and is asked to leave by security. Egged on by Masha, Rupert storms back into the building and roams from office to office searching for Jerry before being tossed out.

Having decided, “A guy can get anything he wants, as long as he’s willing to pay the price,” Rupert abducts Jerry with a toy pistol. He has Jerry phone his producers to read Rupert’s demand from poorly scribbled cue cards. “If a man who identifies himself as the King is not allowed to be the first guest on tonight’s show, you’ll never see me alive again.”

The King of Comedy was an unsettling comedy of manners written in 1972 by Newsweek film critic Paul Zimmerman. Robert DeNiro was eager to star in the project, and spent years trying to get Martin Scorsese to direct it. As a favor, Scorsese finally agreed, but regretted it. He spent close to a year and a half trying to get himself to finish the picture, editing a million feet of film. It was plagued by bad word of mouth, and when finally released, was a disaster at the box office.

The film is much better than he reception it got. It has an uncanny ability to blur the lines between ambition and obsession, celebrity and sociopath, life and art. It went into production shortly after John Lennon was killed by an obsessed fan in New York, and only weeks after John Hinkley shot President Reagan. Hinkley wanted the attention of Jodie Foster, who he became obsessed with after seeing her in Taxi Driver.

There is no violence in The King of Comedy, but hostility lurks behind almost every scene. DeNiro plays Pupkin as one of the great geeks of all time, a boob who can’t keep a cue card turned right side up. But there’s an underlying anger and resentment to his stunts that DeNiro communicates beautifully. Scorsese has called this the best performance DeNiro has given in any of their films, and he may be right.

There really isn’t much of a script though. DeNiro studied standup comic Richard Belzer to prepare, and Bernhard is so wild, she ended of scaring other directors away from casting her. Critics have hailed this as one of the great satires of all time, but the razor sharp dialogue, or the skewering of an institution you’d see in a great social satire just isn’t here. Scorsese isn’t saying much about standup comedy or TV. It’s an actor’s picture, and is hit and miss.