Robert De Niro’s acting career will forever be defined by his 10 feature-length collaborations with director Martin Scorsese. De Niro might have had other career peaks outside his work with Scorsese, including his Oscar-winning performance in The Godfather Part II and his lead role in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. Yet no other director has been on De Niro’s wavelength quite like Scorsese. It shows throughout the movies the pair have made together, not least in their overlooked 1982 classic, The King of Comedy, in which De Niro acts out of his skin.

This black comedy bombed at the box office when it was released, and remains in the shadow of Scorsese’s other work despite the cult status it’s since developed. That the movie isn’t more widely known is all the more surprising given its similarity to Taxi Driver, which is arguably the director’s most famous collaboration with De Niro, and its role in inspiring Todd Phillips’ 2019 box-office record-breaker Joker. After all, there may be no better choice to interview Arthur Fleck on his network television debut than the king of comedy himself.

The King Of Comedy Is Robert De Niro's Most Overlooked Martin Scorsese Movie

It's On A Par With Some Of The Greatest Satire In Cinema History

Murray Goodwin in Joker is a direct reference to De Niro’s performance in The King of Comedy, the fifth movie the actor made with Martin Scorsese. In the film, De Niro plays would-be comedian Rupert Pupkin, whose delusions of grandeur lead him to kidnap the TV host he’s obsessed with. In this way, The King of Comedy is a darkly comical commentary on the trappings of fame, as well as a profound examination of the lengths to which people will go to get attention when they’re desperate and lonely.

Scenes at fictional TV star Jerry Langford’s office and house are some of Scorsese’s finest work, with De Niro at both his funniest and his most tragic. While the movie might not have the gravitas of Taxi Driver, or the technical brilliance of Mean Streets and Goodfellas, it does use the veil of humor to penetrate into the darkest depths of humanity in ways not even these masterpieces manage to do. The King of Comedy deserves to be held up alongside Sidney Lumet’s Network as one of the greatest satires of the televisual age, yet it’s sadly forgotten beneath the weight of its star actor and director’s other achievements.

Rupert Pupkin Is Like Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle But Funnier

Beneath The Veil Of Humor, He Might Even Be Darker

One of the strange ironies of The King of Comedy’s similarities with the plot of Taxi Driver is that Rupert Pupkin arguably ends up being more of a villainous malcontent than quintessential antihero Travis Bickle. Pupkin is more outgoing than Bickle, and much funnier (although usually when he doesn’t intend to be). He has no qualms about accosting his TV hero in the street (in the friendliest manner possible), turning up to his house uninvited for a round of golf, and making seemingly lunatic claims about his aspirations to be a star to the woman he’s attracted to.

Rupert may actually be even more disturbed than Travis Bickle, because he actually goes through with his crime against a beloved public figure, whereas Travis backs out of his.

In another sense, however, Rupert is even more disturbed than Travis, because he actually goes through with his crime against a beloved public figure, whereas Travis backs out of his at the last moment. At the end of Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle appears to be a hero, having saved the underage Iris from a gang of pimps. At the conclusion of The King of Comedy, meanwhile, Rupert Pupkin might have made it onto TV, but he’s presented as a dangerous criminal who ends up in prison. Still, as he says, “It’s better to be king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime.”

Why De Niro & Scorsese Work So Well Together

They're Professional Partners Rather Than Actor And Director

Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese don’t have the kind of actor-director relationship typical of recurring cast in the movies of an auteur filmmaker. Instead, their collaboration is very much a partnership, with De Niro initiating some of the pair’s key projects including Raging Bull and The Irishman. Without De Niro, these movies simply wouldn’t exist. Nor would characters like Travis Bickle in the form we know them today, because much of what we see comes from improvisations that Scorsese encouraged out of the actor.

It’s almost impossible to imagine Rupert Pupkin from The King of Comedy being played by anyone other than Robert De Niro, or directed by anyone other than Martin Scorsese. These two Hollywood legends both hail from New York’s Little Italy, and seemed to understand each other’s cinematic sensibility from the moment that De Niro walked onto the set of Mean Streets to play “Johnny Boy” Civello. Their funniest collaboration came a decade later, to make another classic New York movie that deserves more recognition.