Rupert Pupkin’s mother dead or alive?

Wow good point, I never thought of that. I think the part about his mom being dead was probably a joke.

Given Rupert’s fragile mental condition, my first guess would be that his mother is indeed dead, and that her voice and fleeting image are hallucinations.

I'm on the team (if there is one) that says she is dead.

Not only does it make the movie more chilling (or funny. However you want to look at it.), I think it fits the character of Rupert more than if he was just adding some more punch to his stand-up.
Here are a couple of things I look at:

1. In the scene where Rupert is recording the tape for Jerry and he's interrupted by his mother, Scorsese focuses on a shot of the various life-size cardboard stand ups of celebrities in the corner of the room. This shot is only focused on during a line of her dialogue. I interpret it as it's shown. Rupert's mother is as alive as cardboard. I could be looking into it too much, but the shot is too eerie for me to turn down.

2. In the scene where Rupert is sitting in between Liza Minnelli and Jerry, he is interrupted once again by his mother. She says something a long the lines of "You're going to be late to your appointment and miss your bus. You're always late." That's the general lines of it, probably not word by word at all.
I think that Rupert is keeping the spirit of his mother alive. If he is shouting downstairs at an unreasonable hour, she is going to shout at him and tell him to keep it down. If he is neglecting his duties (going to the studio/offices to see Jerry), she is going to nag him.
We see on more than one occasion that his mother doesn't know what Rupert is really doing down there. She just wants him to shut up.
So why would she know that he had plans to go try to speak to Jerry that day?

3. We never see her. This is important, obviously, to the idea that she is not living anymore.

4. In the fantasy sequence between Jerry and Rupert where Jerry asks him "how he does it?", Rupert straight-out says that he "looks at all the terrible things that have happened to him throughout his life, and tries to make it funny." Once again, not the exact quote but you get the idea. This would back-up his comedy routine we are shown at the end. "If only my mother were alive today, I would say, "Mom, what are you doing here? You've been dead for 8 years!"


I'm sure I could think of more, but I really don't want to try and enforce the idea that she's dead. That's just my personal decision. It makes the movie more satisfying for me. I think everyone can agree that Martin Scorsese purposely left it shady to go a long with the tone of the movie. There are plenty of arguments I'm sure that could left-hand all of my reasonings. I'm curious to hear people's thoughts.

I believe she is alive.
This movie is one of the most painful things I've ever seen. The pure bitterness of DeNiros character.
I think he said she was dead as payback for the way she treated him. That's how bitter and twisted he is, that he would say on television that she is dead. She is, as far as he is concerned, dead to him.

It's not beyond the pale for comedians to say untrue stuff about their family, him saying his mother is dead could just be a satire on the way how some stand ups operate

how is this perplexing? i got over the confusion in 5 nano seconds when i realized it was part of his act.

sure, his fantasies and delusions are captured. but the mom bits were clearly straight forward comedy relief.

Now I Know where the Big Bang Theory's Howard and his Mom scenes originated from.

My vote is that Rupert is being (with certain embellishments) 100% confessional in his comedic turn. He is obviously "deranged" (for lack of a better term) and he states to Jerry that he is 34 years old. In the monologue he says his mother has been dead for nine years which would have put him at age 25, well inside the general age the onset of schizophrenia. After his mother died he went totally off the deep end and the difference between reality and fantasy truly became blurred. One commenter says he wasn't hallucinating, he was fantasizing. Remember, Rupert fantasized that Jerry invited him to the spend the weekend (during the "meeting" in Jerry's office) but when he arrives he says that Jerry invited him. Obviously there is no way to tell for certain (the ambiguity is purposeful) but it would fit perfectly with the character for him to have been telling the straight truth during the monologue.