Divalicious Review! The People’s Joker—Get Ready for Comedic Anarchy and Gender Euphoria
By Caroline Cao | December 5, 2024 | Celebrity & Culture
The People’s Joker is a stealer. And that’s the highest praise for Gothams Award winner Vera Drew’s monumental The People’s Joker, which formulated the personal and pop cultural osmosis in an apotheosis of transformative work. This superhero—or supervillain movie—pushes parody into a surreal and soul-twisting queer comedy of the year.
Call it an “Alternate Universe” or self-insert surrogate class of transformative fan fiction. The People’s Joker is set in the D.C.-laden world of Batman, the Joker and other beloved D.C. villains, borrowing across several movies, including Todd Phillips’ Joker. Oh, it’s not really canon nor part of the official I.P., but it’s a fanfic-y D.C. world, with the art stretching—and exhausting—the boundaries of fair use. Subsumed in a chromatic, eclecticism collage, the world is a comic-colorful kaleidoscopic world of greenscreening and animated cutaways. The copyrighted faces—like Badly CGI Lorne Michaels (voiced by Maria Bamford)—are imagined into cartoony caricatures (please don’t sue them!), though it had been struck from the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, attesting to how far it prodded the legal boundaries.
Throughout her childhood, Vera’s avatar and inhabitants inhale Smylex, a drug that keeps that plastic smile going when her transphobic mom (Lynn Downey as the caricature, yet human, mom) or her comedy school gets judgmental. Our heroine did not have the best childhood, which the makings of a Joker origin story. When she tells her mom she felt born in the wrong body, said mom sticks her in Arkham Asylum for conversion therapy.
When she grows up to venture to the big city of Gotham where comedy is outlawed, our heroine decides to dub their work as “anti-comedy” to loophole around those rules. She discovers and explores her true self as the Joker the Harlequin. But her adventure dovetails her into the perils of the comedy establishment and her toxic romance with a Joker by the name of Mr. J (Kane Distler, playing the Jared Leto take, pitifully but not condoning his cruelty). “This not romance, kids,” she pointedly reminds the fourth wall.
The movie weaponizes artifice as its own jungle gym. The thrills of this wild worldbuilding is that the film hurls you into wacky pocket dimensions of characters and realms and still feels coherent. The conservations it has about comedy, the hunt for identity, punchlines, storytelling, and confessional rings true. The People’s Joker is a springboard for Drew (and co-screenwriter Bri LeRose) to eviscerate the absurdities of constructs, be it the gender construct, realism or comedy rules.
Photo credit: Altered Innocence
