This sounds like an entertaining story, I suppose, but Scorsese doesn’t direct a single scene for a payoff. The whole movie is an exercise in cinema interruptus […]. Scorsese doesn’t want laughs in this movie, and he also doesn’t want release. The whole movie is about the inability of the characters to get any kind of a positive response to their bids for recognition. The King of Comedyis not, you may already have guessed, a fun movie. It is also not a bad movie. It is frustrating to watch, unpleasant to remember, and, in its own way, quite effective. — Roger Ebert