The risqué lines Robert De Niro refused to say: “It was not his cup of tea”
In the past few years, Robert De Niro seems to have forgotten that he was once the star of movies like Mean Streets, The Godfather Part II, and Taxi Driver. Instead, he has taken on some pretty heinous roles, like Dirty Grandpa (it’s exactly what it sounds like), tainting an otherwise spectacular filmography.
Yet, despite the fact that Dirty Grandpa is crammed with some of the most cringe-inducing sex jokes that make De Niro look like nothing more than a pervy old man, why you’d want this on your resumé beats me. Perhaps money was tight? There was a time when he drew the line at a film he deemed too vulgar.
It makes you wonder what kinds of jokes De Niro considers too far, because Dirty Grandpa is chock full of some pretty grim jokes, which firmly cemented it as one of the worst comedies of the 21st century. It’s truly a shit-stain on his filmography. Anyway, De Niro signed up for The Comedian that same year, which saw him play an ageing comic who gets himself into a spot of trouble during one of his performances.
Directed by Taylor Hackford, the movie wasn’t received particularly well, and it’s a real story of what could’ve been. Seriously, there were plans to have Martin Scorsese direct it at first, which could’ve made The Comedian into something completely different entirely.
Instead, the movie seemed doomed from the moment that De Niro started requesting some of the jokes his character tells to be changed.
“That excited me. You get one scene, and you want to do the whole movie,” De Niro told The New York Times about his initial interest in the project. Soon, however, he was worrying that he had signed up to something too risqué.
Screenwriter Art Linson told the publication that they hired stand-up comedian Jeff Ross to help provide some comedic genius, but it was no good. “It was not his cup of tea”, said Linson. “This doesn’t take anything away from Jeff or how funny he is, but there’s a certain attitude that Bob never felt comfortable with.”
For De Niro, the jokes were just too intense and too much for him to feel comfortable with, yet somehow the ones presented in Dirty Grandpa were perfectly fine. The lazy comedy film even made some pretty insensitive jokes with racial and homophobic undertones, but De Niro drew the line at the ones presented by Ross, who specialises in roasting his audience, for The Comedian. Either they were really bad, or De Niro just picks and chooses what he feels comfortable with.
Nevertheless, both movies turned out pretty bad, and De Niro surely learnt his lesson not to take on films that are so obviously going to crash and burn. To be fair to the actor, his choices have gotten better in the past few years, with roles in the likes of The Killers of the Flower Moon and The Alto Knights standing apart from the cheap jokes of Dirty Grandpa and The Comedian that practically served to tear De Niro’s reputation as a Hollywood icon apart.
