Thinking deeply about TV, movies, and music doesn’t make you a “complete idiot.” In fact, it might make you a philosopher, someone who believes the unexamined life is not worth living and the unexamined cartoon is not worth watching.

This is one of the Joker’s roles: to remind us of the chaos and meaninglessness that lurks beneath the surface of our everyday lives. A joker in a deck is the wild card—the randomizer. It throws off what you thought would happen, what you calculated would happen. For the Joker, this could be in the sense of interrupting your day with a goofy, theme

The Joker is something deeper and more menacing, more primal than a mere villain. He’s an “agent of chaos,” as he calls himself in the 2008 movie The Dark Knight. He’s anarchic and volatile even from a creative standpoint. As Tom King, author of one of the longest and most celebrated runs of the twenty‐first century states on social media: “Writing

A common expression for this absurdity is to say “It’s all a big joke.” Bruce Wayne and, in some versions, the Joker are both shaken out of the illusion of a stable, meaningful world by the force of violence. Considering the path that each one took in response to this can help us answer a big question: How do you live with the absurd?

Paraphrasing the Joker: heroes like Batman had a bad day, only they won’t admit it, and keep pretending that life makes sense.26 Bruce Wayne faces the abyss of absurdity but refuses it: by creating Batman’s identity he forces the world to make sense.27

None rise to the level of Batman and Joker, two enemies who seem determined not to kill each other because each gains too much from what the other brings to their destructive dyad. Yet, the Joker is more than simply a foil for Batman; he has his own goals that would exist regardless of whether the Caped Crusader was in the picture.

We could say that the Joker’s nature isn’t psychological, it’s metaphysical. He isn’t merely a broken psyche or a monster. Those two aspects are certainly present, but that's not all there is to him. Most importantly, the Joker embodies unreason, chaos, disorder, and meaninglessness. He arouses the icy suspicion that everything we build will collap

“Nothing does us as much good as the fool’s cap: we need it against ourselves,”1 writes the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). The “fool” destroys by laughing at values and truths, showing the chaotic and senseless world behind them. The fool is a manifestation of the Dionysian, an essential chaotic and destructive drive, but one t

Nietzsche describes three spiritual metamorphoses of the human being. First, the human spirit is a camel burdened with false metaphysical truths, dutifully adhering to societal rules and morality. Men and women can free themselves from this burden by becoming the Lion, who answers “I will” to the “Thou‐shalt” that weighs on the Camel's shoulders.49