Martin Scorsese’s Daughter Makes Him Say That ‘The King of Comedy’ Was ‘Slept On’ in Viral TikTok

In the unholy intersection of online film fandom and degenerate Gen Z TikTok terminology, could there ever be crafted a more cursed comment than, “Rupert Pupkin had no rizz”?

When Martin Scorsese released his retroactively celebrated satirical black comedy film The King of Comedy in 1983, he had no way of knowing that, 40 years later, his future daughter would drag him in front of a camera and force him to describe it and other entries in his celebrated filmography using the parlance of our confusing and mind-numbing times. Over the weekend, 23-year-old Francesca Scorsese posted a TikTok in which she challenges her revered father to guess the meaning of her generation’s slang terms by using sample sentences related to some of his masterworks in a five-minute exercise that could give the average Baby Boomer or above a hospital-level migraine. 

When Francesca quizzed him to define the phrase “slept on” by telling him “The King of Comedy was slept on,” the director’s interpretation was, “People hated it when it came out.” 

“‘It was the flop of the year,’ that’s what it was called. On Entertainment Tonight!” Scorsese recalled with 40-years-fresh frustration. “At New Year’s Eve, ‘83 to ‘84,” he remembered vividly while his Zoomer daughter stared into the camera with concerned incredulity. 

Despite missing the mark on “slept on,” Scorsese would score very highly on the Gen Z slang quiz, with the only other stumbling blocks being the phrases “sneaky link,” “ship” and “simp.” With his upcoming project Killers of the Flower Moon clocking in at a daunting 206-minute runtime, securing the attention of a generation that’s famously deficient in the area is clearly a priority for Scorsese as he seeks to break even on the film’s weighty $200 million budget and indulging his daughter in the slang quiz may increase his clout among the Zoomers.

Of course, if Scorsese ever wants to learn more about what teens-to-20-year-olds are saying, he can always just ask Leonardo DiCaprio to bring his girlfriend to set.