Robert De Niro recently made headlines for saying he could no longer punch Donald Trump in the face now the New York businessman is president-elect. It’s the kind of thing you could imagine his character in The Comedian, the misanthropic burned-out standup Jackie Burke, working into a routine or perhaps taking a step further. In fact, Burke – whose put-upon manager is played by Edie Falco – doesn’t have any such issues with self-constraint, and triggers the film’s first act by assaulting a heckling audience member in a public breakdown that has shades of Michael Richards.  That outburst sets up the well-worn premise of The Comedian: a standup who can’t shake his best known and, often, most mainstream character. Unlike De Niro’s portrayal of wannabe comic Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy – who was a Walter Mitty fantasist a mile away from the big time – Burke has tasted success, and that’s the problem. Despite his best efforts Burke can’t get his fans to see him as something other than Eddie, a sitcom dad who is somewhere between Archie Bunker and Ray Romano. He’s got a catchphrase (“Arlene!”), there’s a suitably hokey theme tune (think Too Many Cooks), which his fellow inmates sing to him when he’s imprisoned for assault and for people of a certain age, it’s clear he’ll forever be Eddie from Eddie’s Home.  It’s while serving his community service at a homeless shelter that Eddie meets fellow malcontent Harmony Schultz, played by Leslie Mann, who transitions smoothly here between the kind of off-the-cuff insult slinging see honed on This Is 40 and a more serious dramatic turn. They become fast friends with Eddie providing some gallows humor for Harmony, who is going through a messy breakup and assault charges herself. The unlikely bedfellows drive much of the action but it’s the peripheral figures who bring in many of the laughs. Danny DeVito plays Burke’s younger brother, while Harvey Keitel is the villain as Harmony’s formerly mobbed-up father, who now runs a retirement home in Florida. They’re joined by cameos from real-life standups such as Hannibal Buress and Jim Norton, who helped De Niro prepare for the role.  As the story of Harmony and Eddie’s unlikely romance unfolds, to the chagrin of Keitel as her brilliantly vile father, it’s interspersed with segments of standup sets from the Comedy Cellar in New York, which are all the kind of prurient and puerile brand of comedy that made Joan Rivers so beloved. The standup scenes are written by Lewis Friedman, and they’re a chorus of child abuse jokes mixed with racist boundary-pushing, which culminates in the film’s two big set pieces. The first is an impromptu set at his niece’s wedding, which involves a joke where the punchline is a pint of semen; and the second a turn at a comedy roast which contributes to someone’s death. It’s in these scenes where the film is at its best, and director Taylor Hackford creates something between the slapstick daftness of Bad Grandpa and the existential darkness of Louie.  Actual comedians have taken on this subject matter before. Ricky Gervais did it in Extras; Larry David is in the middle of producing season nine of Curb Your Enthusiasm; and Steve Coogan’s The Trip often dwells on what happens when you dwell too long. With only the length of a feature film to get his point across, Hackford manages to craft something with a similar feel while creating a film that’s far more accessible for mainstream audiences. The storyline does get frayed towards the end, with a pregnancy plot perhaps being a little bit too obviously designed to get Mann and DeNiro to a dramatic confrontation, but that’s not really the point; as long as you’re here for the dick jokes.
De Niro’s turn as a misanthropic weather-beaten comic who can’t seem to shake his annoying alter-ego, mixes Bad Grandpa’s puerile pathos and Louie’s darkness