Stop Calling The Joker A "Failed Comedian"

Arthur Fleck attempted stand-up comedy one time and he was pretty good at it. It's time to stop this unfair characterization.

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Joker: Folie á Deux opens this week, and I should have a review of that up for you soon (just as soon as I can figure out where the proper accents and punctuation go in the title). A 133-minute musical sequel to Joker, it stars a once-again skeletally thin Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role, with direction from Todd Phillips, aka the “here for the gangbang” guy from Old School. This time around, a new love interest shows up in the form of Ladie G’agá. For weeks I’ve been planning to title my review “A Clown Is Born,” so if anyone beats me to that headline in the interim, no one can say I stole it.

But I’m not here to discuss Folie á Deux, not yet. First, I want to address a popular misconception about the original. Based on the 1988 comic Batman: The Killing Joke, Joker, released in 2019, portrays Arthur Fleck as “a failed comedian” who finally goes insane because of one bad day. I use quotes here because the official descriptions of both the comic and the movie describe Arthur Fleck in just this way, as “a failed comedian.”

I haven’t read the comic on which it’s based, but I have seen the movie and I’m here to tell you: calling Arthur Fleck “a failed comedian” is way off base.

Let’s review some of the facts: Fleck (played by Phoenix) works a job as a party clown. He gets hired to twirl a sign outside of an appliance store to promote their going-out-of-business sale. This all takes place in a Gotham City that very much looks like 1970s New York, complete with a garbage strike (of which New York City had two big ones in 1968 and 1975), a seedy central district, and the cutting of public services — one of which is the social worker who helps Arthur get his psych meds. A shorter way to say this is that it takes place in the world of Taxi Driver (1976), with undertones of Batman IP.

Garbage is piling up on the streets, everything feels like it’s falling apart, and there are delinquents on the loose across the city. The latter fact in particular becomes important when some teenage punks decide to steal Arthur’s flippy sign and kick his ass when he chases after them to try to get it back.

Later, Arthur’s boss takes the sign money out of his paycheck and the bully at the clown union hall (yes, this Gotham has a clown union, complete with a clown union hall, a fact I never tire of mentioning), Randall, lets Arthur borrow his gun for protection. The gun ends up falling out of Arthur’s pocket during a gig at the children’s hospital, and the same boss who garnished his wages over a stolen sign fires him.

Arthur is left with no job, no friends, and no prospects. He finds himself in exactly the kind of life situation that naturally leads one to think, “Maybe I should try stand-up comedy.”

Arthur idolizes TV comedian Murray Franklin (Robert DeNiro, doing a sort of cross between Johnny Carson and Jackie Gleason). He dreams of being just like Murray, putting smiles on the faces of thousands, maybe millions of of adoring strangers. He watches the Murray Franklin show religiously, as part of his escape from his grim reality, and writes all sorts of jokes in his little notebook, in between the crazy stuff. Eventually, Arthur finally works up the courage to go try out some material at an open mic night, partly as a way to impress his cute neighbor, played by Zazie Beets.

We see Arthur at this comedy club (no windows, dimly lit, fake little candles on all the tables), trying to do some material about his mother, complete with an impression of her (classic stand-up comedy premise!). But mostly he can’t get many jokes out, because he has been overcome with one of his many, uncontrollable laughing fits (a neurological disorder Arthur carries a card in his pocket to help him explain). It seems like his first set mostly hasn’t gone well, except: his neighbor likes it! He’s managed to charm her with his performance, whether or not it went the way he was planning. As the old comedy adage goes, “people only remember whether they liked you or not.”

And on those grounds, Arthur didn’t do half bad. The girl he was hoping to impress clearly liked it. I remember hitting on a girl once before a comedy set at an open mic spot. We seemed to be hitting it off, and then I went up for my set. When I came back, all she said was “…comedy seems like it must be really hard.”

“Yeah…” I said, shoving my notebook back into the pocket of my jeans. Those were the last words we spoke.

Which is to say: Artur got a much better response than I did, and I’d been doing comedy a lot longer than he had at that point. To be fair, Zazie Beets’ response, and pretty much all of their scenes together through that point turn out later to have taken place entirely in Arthur’s head, just one of his presumably many delusions. In reality she just thought he was kind of a weird creep the entire time, in the rare moments when she thought about him at all.

And yet! We also find out that someone had been filming Arthur’s performance. How someone in the crowd was able to achieve this using only 1970s technology is kind of a plot hole, if a very small one, but in any case, that footage managed to make its way to famous television personality Murray Franklin. Arthur’s idol! And Franklin found it noteworthy enough that he played it on his show. How many artists get a response from their hero on their very first attempt?

Arthur Fleck had one set as a comedian and he got it onto Gotham’s equivalent of the Tonight Show. Any stand-up comedian would kill for that kind of response (which Fleck sort of did, three bullying stockbrokers on a subway with Randall’s borrowed pistol). Not only that, a booker for the Franklin show calls Arthur a day later to invite him onto the show.

To unpack that even further: Johnny Carson hosted The Tonight Show from 1962 - 1992. Throughout basically his entire run, and certainly during the comedy boom of the eighties, the ironclad benchmarks of success in stand-up comedy were, 1. did you get booked on The Tonight Show? And 2. did Johnny invite you back to his desk after the set?

Here was Arthur Fleck achieving both, after just three-to-six minutes on the job (assuming open mic sets were as long as they were at the La Jolla Comedy Store where I started doing stand-up comedy in 2005).

The next night, Arthur shows up to Murray Franklin’s show (fleeing the cops on the way there) wearing clown make up and asks to be introduced as “Joker,” much to the chagrin of Franklin’s producer, played by Marc Maron (no one talks about how perfectly cast Joker was, from top to bottom). Pretty weird, certainly, but not the mark of a failure.

The cameras roll, and Murray Franklin starts to introduce Arthur. He plays a clip from a part of Arthur’s set that we hadn’t seen up until that point. In the footage, Arthur, bathed in the glow of the spotlight, tells this joke:

“It's funny: when I was a little boy and told people I wanted to be a comedian, everyone laughed at me.

(opens his arms like a big shot)

“Well no one’s laughing now!”

At this point, the people in the audience don’t seem to laugh. But I’m sorry, from an objective perspective, that is a really well-constructed joke. “No one is laughing now”, delivered as a mark of success, to a non-laughing audience (as predicted by the comedian), is pitch-perfect anti-humor. I’ve seen probably thousands of hours of open-mic comedy over the course of my life, and I can assure you that that’s a better joke than 90% of it. “No one’s laughing now!” would kill at any alt-adjacent room in the country.

In the moment, Franklin is so caught up in trying to bully Arthur that he doesn’t really acknowledge what a great joke it is. But that’s fine. True genius is rarely recognized in its own time. Franklin plows on, trying to get Arthur to tell another joke. Arthur pulls out his notebook, and starts leafing through it for an awkwardly long time.

Another great joke! He subverts audience expectations and demonstrates his own confidence by not trying to fill the quiet space. The waiting is the joke. It’s like what Adolf Hitler would do, calmly smoothing his hair and letting the crowd settle down before he started in on a speech. Or what Andy Kaufman did with his Mighty Mouse bit, where the whole joke was forcing the audience to wait a comically long time for something without a huge payoff.

Finally, Arthur says, “Okay, here’s one: knock-knock.”

To which Franklin deadpans, “…And you had to look that up?”

It gets a huge laugh!

Arthur played the idiot for Franklin and it killed. Arthur has never been part of a comedy duo before, and yet here he is, setting his hero up for the big laugh line like an old pro. Clearly, he learned something from all those years (months? weeks?) of clowning.

“Knock knock,” he says again.

“Who’s there?” Franklin says, now with no choice but to play along.

“It’s the police, ma’am,” Arthur reads, smirking. “Your son has been hit by a drunk driver. He’s dead.”

Again, that is really good anti-humor.

It’s funny because Arthur came up with the most horrifying answer to “knock knock” he could think of, and it subverts expectations by being the absolute definition of something one shouldn’t joke about. Surprise is half of comedy.

Murray is horrified, and they go back and forth for a while, culminating in the Joker confessing to killing the three guys on the subway. Murray gets very self-righteous about it at this point, trying to play the conscience of his viewers. He gets up on his moral high horse, and tries to kick Arthur off his show. Arthur tries to get in one last joke before they pull him off the stage.

“How ‘bout another joke, Murray?” Arthur asks, his voice rising. “What do you get when you cross a mentally-ill loner with a system that abandons him and treats him like trash?!”

Franklin tries to cut him off, but Arthur screams, “I’ll tell you what you get: you get what you fucking deserve!” producing the gun he had in his pocket all along and shooting Murray Franklin in the head with Randall’s revolver. He blows Murray Franklin’s his brains all over the back drop of the set while the audience flees.

Okay, admittedly, that last joke isn’t very funny. Arthur sort of responded to Murray’s grandstanding with some grandstanding of his own. The “you get what you deserve” part feels more like a plea for clapter than a genuine joke-joke, and then he introduces a prop for cheap shock value. Not great.

Still, it has the general construction of a joke, and anyway, two out of three jokes that kill isn’t a bad success rate for a stand-up comic. Let alone one who has only done one set! At the very least, Arthur Fleck showed a lot of promise.

Given the evidence, it’s wildly unfair, to both Arthur Fleck and anyone who has ever attempted stand-up comedy, to call him a “failed comedian.”

A failed clown? Also a little premature, but he did get fired, so sure. A murderer? Certainly. A psychopath? A blood-thirsty monster? Probably.

But a failed comedian? No way. Half the point of comedy is to democratize failure. To show that we all put on the red nose and a take a proverbial pie to the face every now and then. The Jokah? He couldn’t get no respect!

It’s an insult to Arthur, the craft of comedy, and anyone who attempts to make art and doesn’t immediately achieve notoriety the first time out to call him a “failed comedian.”

He may have lacked for sanity, compassion, and a basic moral compass, but he displayed promise. And really, what more could you ask of him? The kid had chops.