When the cameras were rolling, he used medium takes without close-ups, so as to capture their astonishment in real time. The director made sure none of the supporting cast were in on it. This exchange was sketched out in secrecy by Scorsese, Pesci and Liotta. “He said to some wiseguy, ‘You’re funny,’ and the guy kind of turned it on him.” “Joe was working at some restaurant in the Bronx or Brooklyn,” Liotta said at a public screening of Goodfellas years later.
The most famous example is the “How am I funny?” scene, in which Tommy turns on Henry after the younger gangster playfully commends his colleague’s ability to tell a joke. One of the conditions under which Joe Pesci had agreed to do Goodfellas was that he could share some of the anecdotes he’d picked up around mobbed-up guys in New Jersey as a teenager. Pileggi was struck, too, by Scorsese’s use of improvisation. But having spent time around “wise guys” as a kid, the adult Scorsese had wanted to get as far from that world as possible. And he’d touched on the dark side of New York with Taxi Driver three years later. True, he’d drawn on his hard-knock upbringing in New York’s Little Italy in 1973’s Mean Streets. The genre had held little interest for the director through his career. The gags also underscored Scorsese’s determination not to make just another mobster flick. Scorsese understood the best way to reel in an audience into this dark and unpleasant world was with jokes and absurdist riffs. Hill’s cocaine-fuelled paranoia in the movie’s closing third. The exasperation of Henry’s mob pals as he separates from his wife. Morris “Morrie” Kessler’s gonzo wig commercials. Many of its best scenes are essentially comic. Goodfellas is, by contrast, a hoot, a caper, a romp.
These are important, austere gangster epics, caught up in their own tragic grandeur. That is arguably why it eclipses The Godfather Parts One and Two and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America.
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