10 Essential Robert De Niro Performances

3. Rupert Pupkin - The King Of Comedy (1982)

Martin Scorsese's most underrated film contains Robert De Niro's weirdest, most unsettling performance. Unfairly overlooked at the time (probably because it came after Raging Bull) The King Of Comedy is the best Scorsese/De Niro picture after the untouchable triumvirate of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas, and in it is a De Niro turn of tar-black comedy.

De Niro plays Rupert Pupkin, a demented, delusional loner who dreams of emulating his idol, talk-show host and comedian, Jerry Langford (a superb Jerry Lewis). When Langford rejects Pupkin, clearly seeing that he's not all there, Pupkin kidnaps Langford, forcing him to put him on his show for a segment of (awful) stand-up. Somehow, Pupkin gets his vaunted 15 minutes of fame, and as the film closes he appears on the cover of Time and writes a best-seller from prison before being released to his own show and adulation. 

You can't take your eyes off De Niro in Comedy, much as you want to, and his Rupert Pupkin is undoubtedly the actor's strangest performance - a kind of psychotic yin to Travis Bickle's sociopathic yang, if you will. Look out for the scene in Jerry's house for De Niro's greatest ever comedy sequence.