“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

His origins, which would somehow define his new self, are uncertain and labile, as the Joker admits: “If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!”28 Thus, only something chaotic and indefinable remains. The Joker becomes an embodiment of chaos and starts spreading it, laughing at society’s illusions.

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

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.

Batman and Joker react differently to Dionysus, to “the bad day,” which changes their lives forever. The Joker embraces the absurd, while Batman “keep[s] pretending that life makes sense.”2 Can the Joker truly create new meaning, or is he just “a fool” who can merely destroy? By examining some of the most emblematic Joker stories, this chapter

Batman is what you might call a character of meaning. His oath makes sense of what would seem utter madness—plunging nightly into the most dangerous city in the world, without superpowers, denying himself the monstrous privilege of killing.

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.

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,

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