“But seriously, you should’ve seen my mother. She was wonderful. Blonde, beautiful, intelligent, alcoholic. Once they picked her up for speeding. They clocked her doing 55. All right, but in our garage?”

“The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor,” groaned Leonard Cohen not so long ago, decrying the way the powerful could cajole and pacify the masses when communications was in the hands of the few. But that was before the democratization of the media, before everyone had a channel or two hundred, before Survivors and Idols and Bachelors. Back when the playing field was still uneven and a lack of discernible talent was considered a detriment, there was a simple man named Rupert Pupkin who stormed the gates.

Pupkin (Robert De Niro), an obsessed, delusional fan of New York talk show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), lives in his mother’s basement and ekes out a tiny existence while dreaming big. He’s a peasant who sees himself as a king—the king of comedy, to be precise. Rupert hones stand-up material in his dank apartment during the night, chats with cardboard cut-outs of Liza and the like and works on one-liners. He spends the rest of the time with stalkerish autograph hound Marcia (Sandra Bernhard), who makes him seem relatively balanced by comparison.

An awkward meeting with Jerry leads Rupert to believe that he’ll soon be sharing couch space with the legendary host, but it only brings the aspiring comic rejection and humiliation. Desperate, Rupert schemes with Marcia to kidnap Jerry and keep him until he gets his ransom—the chance to do the monologue on Langford’s show. Will his moment in the spotlight transform Rupert’s life or only confirm his failure? After all, unfettered democracy guarantees neither greatness nor meritocracy, only opportunity.•