The People’s Joker
Long before the audience gets to experience any images in the Batman-worshiping satire “The People’s Joker” created by Vera Drew, they are welcomed with a notice. “This film is a parody and is at present time completely unauthorized by DC Comics, Warner Bros. Discovery or any other party that lays claim to ownership of the characters and subjects that are parodied and referred to,” etc. After which they add “To Mom, and Joel Schumacher.”
The study of one person’s very strange approach often seems to correlate with the claims made in the title of “The People’s Joker.” It is primarily: “parody” for the sake of it, an ecstatic explosion against the oppression of such commercially designed emotional extremes. Rather steal a focus ‘The People’s Joker’ is a true weapon used to redefine emotions that are almost completely banned. After all, it does not invite viewers to join the world of cinema marveling, like a synonym to a world of loveliness, which means that it should take time to even penetrate the audience’s mind. There was no war for audiences the film was only scratching the surface on international expansion. It started its journey in the United States in 2022 at BBC and Tiff premier. It is bewildering a tale of a torrid life that finally finds itself turned warm and bright. The jelousy is purely situational about reasons that Roman Drew and Matt Bisonodanu have spent nearly two decades pouring their chronicles into the same mixture.
New York trans comedienne Drew, who also serves as an executive editor on alt comedies such as “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson” and “Tim and Eric,” interprets The People’s Joker more as the story of her life as a woman and a trans underground comic, who happens to use Bat’s comic lens to narrate the story rather than simply being a penetrating satire on the caped crusader universe. Drew, aka Joker the Harlequin, possesses all the attributes of a supervillain and the quintessential trauma that molded her. A Midwestern background that was protective, a father who walked out of the picture, a mother (Lynn Downey) who never showed affection, a history that submerged her in the horrors of gender identity. The only sources of pleasure afforded to her are Batman comics, Nicole Kidman playing around Val Kilmer’s rubber breast plates in “Batman Forever,” and the smut humor of a skit program akin to “SNL,” called “UCB.” “In my childhood. when I sit right in the corner of the room. I wanted to be a joker,” she remembers and states.
With dreams of travelling to fame or perhaps seeking slumber in Gotham City, Drew goes out for a UCB audition after revamping her savings.
However, when she is expelled on the first day, together with comrade Penguin (Nathan Faustyn), who is also a comedy dropout, she continues to pursue an ‘anithcomedy’ business with other city villains. In the process, she comes to terms with her emerging sense of transness, or perhaps her own Jokerfication, as a consequence of years wrestling with sketch comedy burnout, combined with having a stereotyped abusive relationship with one of the Joker’s characters (a transmasc Jared Leto-type character played by Kane Distler).
It’s a hideous, chaotic scene mixture that is successful because of, not in spite of, its disorder. Drew periods from one view to another with all the inconsistencies one expects from the Clown Prince of Crime. This time, however, she is the Clown Princess of Comedy rather than the Clown Princess of Crime, and the Batman aesthetics still come drained of life, allowing her to understand and channel her anger towards (and find a community in) the standup comedy stand up comedy. The sad fact of the matter is there is the dirty side of social climbing in NY for comedians, expensive comedy classes as well. The dating scene would be one where one of Jokers many rules of love goes thus ‘Don’t date comedians. Ever.’ There is plenty of such easter eggs but the story narrating the whole thing is in a very appealing and satisfying combination of Batman from different media and time periods the 60s sitcom rapid changes of different scenes, Batman Begins’ ice sheet sword style fight as just one of the scenes of the comedy 101, or even Joker’s dance of choreographically revealing the various stairs.
Similar to the best anti-comedy examples, so unsophisticated is the material when it is combined with the performances that it holds an opposite appeal to the film. Drew’s a confident performer, but there is something about the nerves she brings on screen that simply means Joker is shy early on too. But once she starts to really, as the Internet would say, go full Joker, she hits the perfect manic cackle and all the crazy Chaplin like physicality that comes with the role. (Her mind works somewhere between Jack Nicholson and Joaquin Phoenix in an instant.) As the two devils sitting on the shoulders of Joker from two opposing corners, Downey and Distler do a great job in revealing the vulnerabilities that are responsible for their different kinds of temptations.
The People’s Joker does away with the enormous budgets that are characteristic of DC movies, and instead merges what are some great green-screen elements of Drew of making very terrific animation cutouts that vary from the most primitive cartoons that you would find on Newgrounds up and including to Minecraft worlds and the most ridiculous floppy CG models that appear in Japanese news. She hired hundreds of artists to do this, and the finished collage constantly throws something different and fresh in front of you.
This is the story of outsiders, created by outsiders, feeling like outsider art, which is quite possibly the most interesting aspect of this film.
To watch “The People’s Joker” makes one feel like getting away with something. And in a way, yes, we, as well as Drew are. Now, no more allegiance to a big corporate IP, free in the oceans of fair use, the movie gets to recreate the superhero genre in her own likeness. To be in a comic book world after all, is to be about superheroes and alter egos, new personalities people bring out when they are trying to be who they are supposed to be. Why not extend that to the mutli-faceted profession of stand-up comedy, and even more importantly, the quests of trans and nonbinary individuals related to owning their distinct alter egos? Perhaps in this day and age where we seem to be more exhausted with the idea of superhero movies, a new joker needs to be the one in charge of the entire town.
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