It was Andy Warhol who said that every American would get his thirty seconds of celebrity. The King of Comedy is about Rupert Pupkin, a pest of a guy who was a bit greedier and a lot crazier than your average American. Rupert wanted ten minutes. Robert De Niro plays Pupkin for all he's worth, eking substance out of a vacuum. Draped in loutish polyester, this brash, bothersome twerp is driven by a voiceless despair. And perhaps if this despair can be given a voice through the enormous amplification of a national broadcast, then away with the numbing anonymity. A half-baked comedian, Pupkin delivers mediocre one-liners to fabricated audiences and fantasizes his appearance on the top-rated "Jerry Langford Show." If Pupkin is the bad news, then Langford, played with cool annoyance by Jerry Lewis, should be good news. But he's not. For the accomplished celebrity, whose night-time companions are a bank of televisions and a squirrelly Pekinese, privacy and passion have been discarded along the path to popularity. Scorsese's meditation on celebrity is wrought with icy detachment, preventing the kind of identification that cripples Pupkin. Pupkin's yearning somehow transforms The Tube into a medium of ascension; our anti-hero wants to rise above the audience share and into the privileged, televised haunt of the star. There's no place as chilly as the Nielsen Family's living room. Steve Seid