How Martin Scorsese’s ‘The King of Comedy’ and DC Comics History Could Inform the Joker Origin Movie

We’re still a year away from the release of Todd Phillips’ Joker movie, an ‘80s-set origin film for the Clown Prince of Crime starring Joaquin Phoenix. As casting details trickle in, however, an early picture is beginning to form of what the movie might look like. One major hint of the perspective it could employ came with the recent news that the film will depict Batman’s father, Thomas Wayne, as a “cheesy and tanned,” Trump-esque ‘80s businessman.

Looking to The Art of the Deal book cover instead of the comic book page as a reference for Thomas Wayne would yield an irreverent take on the character, one we haven’t seen before. Yet that take would be fully in line with a story grounded in the POV of a delusional, down-on-his-luck comedian who is resentful of the success of Gotham City’s leading citizen. Joker (which is what we’ll be calling this movie for now, as the official title has yet to be announced) looks to be going for this interpretation of the villain, drawing inspiration from Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s seminal 1988 graphic novel, Batman: The Killing Joke. The movie will also reportedly include nods to The King of Comedy, the undervalued 1982 Martin Scorsese gem about a wannabe comedian with delusions of grandeur.

The casting of Robert De Niro as a “talk show host who is somehow instrumental in the Joker’s origin” (a reversal of his King of Comedy role) would only seem to cement The King of Comedy as an important touchstone for the Joker movie. Let’s examine how Scorsese’s film, combined with The Killing Joke and Phoenix’s transformative ability, could renew the Joker’s legend with an interesting portrayal on-screen.

The King of Comedy

While classics like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas have traditionally overshadowed The King of Comedy and labeled it as one of the lesser collaborations between Scorsese and De Niro, the film has undergone a significant reappraisal since its U.S. theatrical release back in 1983, when it was met with a muted reception. Maverick critics now regard it as Scorsese’s finest film and in comedy, it holds its own reputation as a highly influential work. Let’s first dig into this movie and then talk about how the troubled arc of its main character could tie back to the Joker movie, which Warner Bros. has described as an “exploration of a man disregarded by society [that] is not only a gritty character study, but also a broader cautionary tale.”

The King of Comedy is a film that should be required viewing for anyone who aspires to be famous. It’s a movie that shows an isolated dreamer who is so caught up in his own self-aggrandizing fantasy world that he is unable to merge his dreams with the flow of reality. The movie gets to the heart of the narcissism that makes a person like that tick.

De Niro’s unreliable narrator, Rupert Pupkin, inhabits the lowest rung of a celebrity-obsessed culture. He’s first shown staking himself outside the stage door of The Jerry Langford Show with a mob of screaming fans, some of whom clearly know him from the autograph-hunting circuit. A red-headed stalker named Masha, played by real-life stand-up comic Sandra Bernhard, registers as a peer to Rupert, yet it’s clear from the way he interacts with her and others that Rupert has an inflated sense of worth.

His ambition is to be a comedian but instead of starting out small — playing nightclubs in New York, working his way up the showbiz ladder — he clings to the false hope of being an overnight success. When a producer’s assistant reviews a tape Rupert has made of some of his material and tries to give him some earnest feedback, he doesn’t want to listen. Unable to take stock of his true position, Rupert thinks the world owes him and the road to stardom will be quick and easy.

At first, it’s rather pitiable to see this overgrown boy with a mustache play-acting in his room, which he has decorated like the set of his own personal talk show, complete with cardboard cutouts of guests like Liza Minnelli. The famous “You talkin’ to me?” scene in Taxi Driver, where De Niro’s other lonely, disturbed individual, Travis Bickle, practices his quick draw in front of the mirror, plays out in a more amusing version here, as Rupert lives with his mother and she is prone to interrupting him. Even with such reminders of the real world, however, he never quite fully comes back from the land of make-believe, because Rupert is someone whose fantasy life is, in fact, indistinguishable to him from reality.

Like Bickle, this makes him dangerous, unable to cope with the rude awakening he faces when reality inevitably comes crashing in. Rupert thinks the world revolves around him and when the dreamer in him finally becomes a doer, it does so in a way that twists the notion of achievement into something criminal. Kidnapping his idol and holding him at gunpoint, making the jaded talk show host, Langford, read ransom demands over the phone while he’s duct-taped to a chair, Rupert forces his way on television, where he finally gets to deliver his stand-up monologue in front of a live studio audience during a taping of The Jerry Langford Show with guest host Tony Randall.

That Rupert actually manages to deliver a smooth set and get some laughs from the audience (presuming its response is real at this point and not just imagined) only makes his story that much crazier and sadder, because it suggests that if he had applied himself the right way — putting his head down and doing the grunt work of a club comic — he might have actually gotten somewhere without having to resort to a desperate scheme that would land him in jail. Rupert’s parting quote before going off to jail is, “Better to be king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime.” So grotesque is the nature of the media that it seemingly rewards this man for his crime with the very fame he coveted.

Then again, who’s to say that’s what really happened at the end of the movie? In The King of Comedy, we see two different versions of Langford, played by comedy legend Jerry Lewis (with a sobriety that belies his slapstick fame). One Langford is real and the other exists solely in the mind of Rupert. Scenes in the film are edited together in such a way that the viewer is left gliding in and out of Rupert’s fantasy sequences, with only Langford’s overly complimentary, out-of-character behavior to indicate the surreal falsity of any given scene. By the end, there’s no telling if what we are seeing is real or simply another product of Rupert’s psychosis.

This is where the movie dovetails with what we know about Joker, its casting, and its title character’s history. Think of Alec Baldwin’s hammy Trump impersonation: the bad wig, the pursed lips, the orange spray-on tan. Now juxtapose that with the image of Thomas Wayne and imagine it being filtered through the Joker’s warped perception of the world. De Niro’s talk show host herein fills a role similar that of Langford; Marc Maron plays his booking agent, who functions as a liaison to guests à la the character of Cathy Long (Shelley Hack) in The King of Comedy. Meanwhile, the voice of Rupert’s mother, which we only got to hear coming from off-screen in The King of Comedy, gets fleshed out into the character of Penny, the Joker’s mother, played by Francis Conroy.

Having seen Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here this year, it’s easy to imagine Phoenix playing another misfit who must care for his mother at home. It’s also easy, having seen Zazie Beetz as Domino in Deadpool 2 this year, to imagine her acting as an unimpressed foil for a struggling stand-up comic, much like Diahnne Abbott’s weary bartender does with Rupert in The King of Comedy. Beetz is set to play “a single mother who catches the eye of the man who will become” the Joker. Her character could also double as an analog to the Joker’s pregnant wife in The Killing Joke.

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