Why the rise of the political ‘Jokers’ is a dangerous precedent

A standard theory is that comedy is the pressure valve which relieves social pressures, manages collective tensions. But what happens when it instead becomes a sharp and polarising weapon?

We have the incessant toff-amateur cabaret act from Boris Johnson – which, in character, answers “humbug” to female opposition MPs as they relate their experiences of death-threats.

Then there’s the comedian-turned-president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. He rode into power on the back of his comic portrayal of an anti-corruption schoolteacher, swept to the top political job. However, Zelenskiy seemed to lose his satirical bite in his leaked conversations with Donald Trump this Thursday.

And in the cultural zone, there’s a rising moral panic about the new superhero film Joker.

It portrays Batman’s adversary as an alienated, celibate, white male loner. His eventual outbursts of violence trigger a class war from below, erupting within a decrepit, oppressive Gotham City.

Many critics are worrying that the film is too close to the bone – and that the Joker’s joyful nihilism is all too copyable by the desperate and lonely, in current conditions.

So we need a complex reckoning with the unpredictable electricity of humour and comedy, as it crackles through our public lives at the moment.

Boris Johnson has quite clearly politically triumphed through his comic persona, which most biographical profiles say has been cultivated from youth. With his so-called gaffes, bad or offensive puns, meandering Latin-strewn sentences (I must confess to being immune to it all), what does Johnson win?

READ MORE: Even No voters must know we’re better without Boris Johnson

The sociologist William Davies says he wins the “involuntary response” of laughter – a bodily as much as a rational reaction, exploding emotions and positive chemicals into the brain.

The funny, taboo-tickling politician is thus perfectly suited to the social media age. Davies compares it to the stand-up and their audience.

Each of them seek jolts of pleasurable insight, which the audience experiences collectively. In the digital space, it’s the instant response that matters, not the pondered judgement.

This is far away from the pre-internet public sphere, where a dedicated class of media experts stood between us and politics. They had the time to ruminate on a figure like Johnson, and pronounce him a “demagogue” or a “charlatan”.

(To measure the difference, consider Good Morning Britain when it launched in 1981, deeply serious with David Frost and Anna Ford; and the current face-painted-pillow-on-a-stick, hitting guests for laughs and shocks, the results immediately turned into memes for Twitter and Facebook.) Maybe this frenetic, blurry environment, jollied along by fruity insults and frothy metaphors, means that Johnson will succeed in pushing these islands over the Brexit line. Or maybe dour Parliamentary rationality will triumph, led by not-notably-humorous figures like Corbyn, Sturgeon, Grieve, Swinson or Lucas. The next few weeks shall tell.

Johnson polished his routine on comedy and current affairs shows, using the Mayoralty of London as his biggest stage. The phenomenon of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy cranks this up to another level.

In what has been described as the world’s first “virtual” campaign – no debates, no press conferences, no meet-the-public events – Zelenskiy appeared solely on broadcast channels and YouTube (remind you of Boris’s sequestering from the public?), vaguely gesturing towards “honesty”, “new faces” and “change”.

Zelenskiy encouraged the blurring between his own candidacy and that of his TV persona. Both characters vaunted their inexperience and freshness, in a country beset with endemic old-boys corruption.

Indeed, Zelenskiy’s political party was started by his production company, and shared the same title as the show: Servant of the People.

If you have access to Netflix, you can currently see the series itself (at least the first one in 2015).

It’s gentle, charming satire – but when you think of subsequent developments, it feels weird. Given Trump’s effective persona-building through The Apprentice, you experience strange retrospective yearnings. Why didn’t Martin Sheen take a run at office after The West Wing?

Yet it looks like virtuality and comic charm may have its limits. Zelenskiy’s diplomatic imbroglio with Trump seems to implicate him in no less than the US President’s impeachment charges.

Add to that worrying signs he’s susceptible to terrible oligarchs (like Igor Kolomoisky, the corrupt media baron who distributed his series). It’s possible that standard political inexperience may well drag down such strange, half-real political constructions as Zelenskiy.

You might even be entertaining hopes that some kind of normality might well break out soon. Supreme Court judges making their democracy-defending declarations; progressive parties linking arms to prevent the worst of Brexit. Solid people following the rule of law, nodded on by considerate, thoughtful citizens. Phew. What a relief.

You better not go and see Joker, then. The critics’ reaction to yet another narrative from the superhero universe has been a striking mixture – both hyperbolae, and genuine nervousness.

Do we really need another story which puts us brilliantly in the shoes of another angst-ridden white male, whose pathologies trigger off a clown-faced urban revolution?

Particularly in an America juddering with mass shooters, who cite their cultural references as inspirations. Should such a reaction be made plausible, empathetic, in mass entertainment formats?

We’ve been here before, with hand-waving about movies like Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange in 1971, Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing in 1989, or Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers in 1993.

But I’m less interested in the moral panic around Joker – violent media can serve to dissipate, as well as intensify, violent feelings – than in its grim deconstruction of humour and comedy itself. As Davies writes in his essay, maybe we need to “resist getting seduced by humour, rhetorical reflexes and bravado… In place of staged combat, we need to find the time and the space to carry out critical analysis. A bit of humourlessness might go a long way”.

I’d suggest Joker will help. For Arthur Fleck (the citizen behind the Joker, fully embodied by Joaquin Phoenix), mental illness and anomie drives his clowning persona, by which he makes a living. His public reward for that in the street? Derision and beatings.

Fleck is obsessed with a nightly TV comedy-host called Murray Franklin (appropriately played by Robert De Niro). Like Scorsese’s King of Comedy, the charisma of comic mastery is dissected and laid out in Joker. It shows how cheap and passive our attractions are to these figures.

And finally, when the underclass of this unequal Gotham decide to strike upwards, they chose the clown mask for their icon and disguise (just as recent urban insurgents have chosen the V For Vendetta mask).

As various politicians and pundits invoke “riots” as a possible response to an ill-completed Brexit, the movie couldn’t be more cautionary, or suggest better questions.

Do you want a social anger that’s as destructively playful as this? Is there a despair beneath the permanent recourse to humour and wit, and our attraction to its merchants, that might curdle into something worse?

We citizens are at the foothills of realising just how jerked around our emotions and sensibilities have been, by political operators and marketing experts of all kinds, for many decades.

It’s time we woke up to it – calling it out when we feel that “projects” are stabbing at our “fears”, for example.

But humour is the slippiest emotion of all. It’s both a trap and a release; a way to survive but also a controlling action. So beware, or at least somewhat grimly regard, the naturally funny politician.