In “Raging Bull” and “The King of Comedy,” Robert De Niro did stand-up comedy badly. In “The Comedian” he does it badly again — there’s that same air of menace and gracelessness — but this time the movie want us to think he’s brilliant.
De Niro plays Jackie Burke (short for Berkowitz), a washed-up former sitcom star who, after playing a nostalgia gig in Hicksville for “$11 and a burger,” gets in a fight with an audience member and winds up doing 30 days in prison. Sentenced to community service when he gets out, he meets a frustrated younger woman (Leslie Mann) who’s doing penance for smashing her ex and his new girl with a lamp.
Mann wasn’t in kindergarten when De Niro made “Taxi Driver” but, improbably, the two begin to flirt.
The movie, stodgily directed by Taylor Hackford, doesn’t much explore what it might be like to date a woman young enough to be your daughter, or why a girlish, giggly charmer of 44 might be interested in a grim-faced 73-year-old, just as it doesn’t consider what it might be like to go to prison as a septuagenarian. Mostly the film just strings together stand-up routines full of dirty jokes — heavy on the incest and child abuse references. It barely shrugs at several passing conflicts: Jackie is in debt to his diner-owner brother (Danny DeVito), hates his sister-in-law (Patti LuPone) and falls afoul of his new girlfriend’s rich dad (Harvey Keitel) but none of this goes anywhere.
The bits aren’t bad, if you like the Friars Club school of comedy, but De Niro is. His clenched intensity ruins the bits, and the many real comics we see in cameos shame him. On at least three occasions, though, other characters tell him how hilarious he is. That’s a dire mistake on the part of the script, credited to four writers, two of them stand-ups. If you’re really funny, no announcement should be necessary.
Nor does the film ever get beneath Jackie’s skin. Sure, he hates himself for having made his fortune bellowing cheesy catchphrases on a “Honeymooners”-style network TV show, and maybe he hates his fans even more. But so what? “Comics are misanthropic” is an idea about as new as “the sun is hot.”
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