I had forgotten, until I saw it again over the weekend, how terrific Martin Scorcese's seriously underappreciated 1983 film "The King of Comedy" is.

It is a darkly funny, often surrealistic look at celebrity fixation in American culture, and it presciently anticipated where we were headed--in a world before the term "stalker" had become a household word. It's a topic with which Scorcese has more than a passing interest--psychotic drifter John W. Hinkley once shot the President of the United States to impress Jodie Foster, whom he had become obsessed with after seeing her in Scorcese's "Taxi Driver."

"The King of Comedy" is one of Robert DeNiro's finest performances, and Jerry Lewis is suprisingly strong in a straight role as a Johnny Carson-type late night talk show host. Knowing what we know now, it's one of the rare films that's actually better twenty years after it was made.

It also inspired the best line from one of my favorite shows ever. On "The Larry Sanders Show" (Garry Shandling's brilliant, erstwhile, behind-the-scenes satire of late night comedy), sidekick Hank Kingsley begs for a shot guest-hosting in Larry's absence, and is finally granted the opportunity to audition in a test program. When Larry later checks in with producer Artie to see how the disasterous audition has gone, Artie replies to him, "Does the name Rupert Pupkin mean anything to you?"