A few amazing scenes make King of Comedy worth watching

"The King of Comedy" is a minor Martin Scorsese work but has many of the incidental pleasures and astonishments of his best work, none the less - notably the gritty and dark urban realism of New York City in the 80s-90s for one thing and the smart, inside appreciation of show biz, TV, the comedy circuit, as seen and known from the inside, as well as another portrait of a very strange, alienated, troublesome, slightly frightening loser, once again played by De Niro but this time as would-be comic, Rupert Pupkin, certainly demented and delusional, but a bit more lighthearted and goofy than the protagonists in Taxi Driver and Mean Streets - he could at any point go off the rails and become truly dangerous rather than just annoying, but the movie pulls him back from the edge and toward a softer, somewhat ambiguous conclusion. De Niro is awesome as usual, and Jerry Lewis, as a a Johnny Carson character when Tonight was nightly in NYC, is excellent, showing he had potential for some serious dramatic acting - too bad he was so type-cast as a goofball. Sandra Bernhardt is one of the weaknesses of the film, her character poorly developed (not entirely her fault) and Scorsese much less certain when filming her uppercrust "town house" than he is in the grittier environments that he uses to such good effect elsewhere in the film. A few absolutely amazing scenes make the whole movie worth watching: De Niro in Lewis sharing a limo ride as De Niro tries to sell his routine to Lewis, De Niro (spoiler!) ultimately performing on national TV - great to see how well this pro can play an amateur, bumbling comedian.