How hatred drove Martin Scorsese’s ‘The King of Comedy’ to excellence
The 1982 satirical crime movie The King of Comedy, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, tells of celebrity obsession and the consequences of fame. De Niro plays Robert Pupkin, a hopeful stand-up comedian who develops an obsession with the fictional talk show host Jerry Langford, which was based on Johnny Carson.
After the screenplay swapped hands several times, De Niro was eventually set on playing Pupkin, and it was the iconic actor who eventually convinced his frequent collaborator Scorsese to take the director’s chair. For the role of Langford, the duo considered several high-profile names, including Johnny Carson himself, Dick Cavett, Frank Sinatra and even Orson Welles. In the end, though, it was the stand-up comedian Jerry Lewis who got the part.
Sandra Bernhard, who played Masha in the movie, a similar obsessive of Langeford’s, recently stated that getting Jerry Lewis to play the role was a big coup for the film. She recently told The Telegraph: “We all grew up with Jerry Lewis. He was a big part of American culture. He was just the eternal adolescent goofball”.
However, Lewis’ behaviour on set was not acceptable, particularly to women who had started to make a dent on the comedy circuit themselves, like Bernhard. “Women were superfluous to him, especially in the setting of working with him as a performer-actor,” Bernhard added. “And then you add in the whole idea of the completely new generation of women like myself [and] he couldn’t wrap his mind around it.”
One of the central scenes of the film is when Masha ties up Langford and incites a romantic candlelit dinner for the two, getting more maniacal by the minute. Of the scene, Bernhard noted, “He [Scorsese] wanted it to be over the top, and that was very easy for me at that time to do – intense and crazy – because I guess, I was very young, and I was sort of like, ‘Okay, great, I’ll do it.’ It would be much harder for me to access that part of myself now, I think.”
Perhaps it was the fact that Lewis had already rubbed Bernhard up the wrong way that she was able to access an inner emotion and make the scene more believable. Lewis had called Bernhard “fish lips” on set, and when she raised the issue with Scorsese, she later received a handwritten note from Lewis with a half-apology written on it. However, the note quickly went missing from her dressing room.
“I don’t know if somebody came and cleaned up the room and took it,” Bernhard added, “but it was my imagining that Jerry Lewis sent somebody in to take it back so that there would be no proof that he had ever apologised.” Still, perhaps it was that very tension that helped to create the excellent final product of the film.
Interestingly, the tense production almost proved to be too much to bear for Scorsese, who revealed in his book Scorsese on Scorsese, “I got myself into such a state of anxiety that I just completely crashed. I’d come downstairs from the editing room, and I’d see a message from somebody about some problem, and I’d say, ‘I can’t work today. It’s impossible.'” Thankfully, though, the legendary director found it in him to work his magic and make one of his best films to date.
