Melanie Jame Wolf’s Pop-Cultural Drag: The Chronopolitics of Labour, Libido and Image

Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982) portrayed an unfunny would-be comic Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) kidnapping his comic hero (Jerry Lewis) as a frenzied effort to nab the spotlight at whatever cost. Too clever for its own good, The King of Comedy succeeded as a critique of the rampant and delusional desire for fame and overnight celebrity within a late 20th-century televisual milieu. But commercially it was a failure, dubbed “box office poison” and chalked up to not being funny at all. The price of Rupert Pupkin’s comic quest warns of a blurring of fantasy and reality that results from an overinvestment in media imagery. One telling scene shows the wannabe stand-up performing in his basement to a cardboard audience, the camera panning back to reveal a cold and empty sound stage where canned laughter spurs him on, even if it’s only heard as diegetic sound in his imagination. “Rupert can be understood as an existential clown,” writes film critic Christina Marie Newland, “a comedian who is his own perpetual joke”.

More from this Issue

#IMadeMyClothes: The Ethics and Practices of Home Dressmaking

“Look at that: you made it”
Alanna Okun, The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater.

I learned to sew as a young child. Sitting in my mother’s lap, I picked up the delicate and confident touch and precision to snip threads and manipulate cloth as she made clothes for herself, my sister and me. Before I could read and write, I was adept at using a needle and thread to form my creative visions in the three-dimensional materiality of cloth. Mum taught me to cut, alter and mend to make efficient use of materials and garments, a make-do-and-mend sensibility that she learned from her own mother, raised during the Depression in rural South Australia. At my mother’s side, I also came to understand and express my sartorial sensibility and identity through the garments I made. Mine is a common story.

Madeleine C. Seys