I watched The King of Comedy for the first time over the weekend, and I think it might have already become my favourite Martin Scorsese film. 
My partner found it almost unbearable; she could appreciate it, but she had difficulty 'enjoying' it. But I loved every minute of it, perhaps because I found something uncomfortably familiar about Rupert Pupkin. As someone who has been quietly doing his own creative thing (in my case writing) for a very long time, and who finds any kind of self-promotion - or indeed any real self-expression - incredibly challenging, there's a lot about him which is familiar to me. The way in which I secretly crave recognition while being too afraid to actually work for it through normal means; the way in which non-codified social interactions are awkward for me to the point of painfulness; the craving for the arts as a kind of release for the kinds of impulses most people satisfy from entirely ordinary means. And of course there's the occasional cameo by the violent manifestation of my Id, probably also played by Sandra Bernhard. 
But in a way I found it comforting rather than embarrassing to watch. It's much like how I feel about Curb Your Enthusiasm, a show which I've also been (re)watching. I love Curb because it takes the most absurd, overwrought inventions of my own anxieties and lays them out as if they were something that could actually happen. It's like somebody over-thought every situation in the same way I frequently do, except it doesn't end up with me getting stabbed or pushed in front of a train. It's a way of saying: see, maybe it won't be so bad? If this idiot can muddle his way through, so can you?