According to Deadline, Jennifer Aniston is set to star alongside Robert De Niro in The Comedian, an upcoming drama directed by Taylor Hackford. As we previously pointed out, The Comedian is not a sequel to The King Of Comedy, so please stop imagining a seventysomething Rupert Pupkin navigating the confusing landscape of alt-comedy podcasts. Cease conjuring up scenes of De Niro’s Pupkin and Sandra Bernhard plotting a hair-brained scheme to kidnap Stephen Colbert. And quit fantasizing about the reunion of Scorsese and De Niro that’s supposedly happening next year—De Niro has been teasing us with that since 2010.
Instead, The Comedian is the somber story of an aging insult comic who is presumably even nastier and more depressed after several decades of life on the road, delivering perfectly formed haiku zingers forged in the blast furnace of externalized self-loathing. Aniston will meet De Niro’s character at a wedding, where they will “begin a close relationship.” It’s not clear if that relationship will be romantic, professional, the end of a familial estrangement, a protracted exchange of verbal abuse, or all four. As long as he’s not playing a retired marine trying to secure the gift of gonorrhea for his grandchild, we’re fine with whatever happens.
The script was co-written by noted roastmaster/prisoner-rights activist Jeff Ross, so you know that De Niro’s barbs will sting when production begins next year in New York.