Martin Scorsese: Ranking His Movies From Worst To Best

12. The King Of Comedy

Few of Martin Scorsese's movies have been quite so misunderstood - and subsequently undervalued - upon their release as The King of Comedy, his 1983 movie starring regular collaborator Robert De Niro as a borderline psychopathic autograph hound/aspiring stand-up comedian. It's often said that there's an element of madness in comedy, and this trueism is just one of the targets set up to be explored by Scorsese in The King of Comedy. The other is perhaps far more relevant today than it was upon its release, and that is the notion of celebrity worship and the desire for what Andy Warhol famously referred to as "15 minutes of fame" in a culture in which the media is paramount. Comedy doesn't come much darker than The King of Comedy and De Niro's performance can be seen as a counterpart to his classic turn as the unhinged Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. The film would make a good companion piece to Network, too, an earlier movie which used scathing satire to mock the manipulative, dehumanising nature of the media.