since his bronze age revision, the joker has -

Working paper. Please cite final version in: Manivannan, V. (2014). “Never give ’em what they expect”: The Joker ethos as paradigmatic of lulz on 4chan’s /b/.

In R. Peaslee & R. Weiner (Eds.), The Joker: Critical Essays on the Clown Prince of Crime. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Since his Bronze Age revision, the Joker has consistently served as an archetypal

trickster, alternating between clever, nonviolent whimsy and vicious malice. Like Trickster, he

is well-versed in social engineering and stagecraft, practical jokes, and idiomatic verbal humor,

employing each to maximize his sense of schadenfreude. This behavior, which typifies the Joker

ethos, is generally misconstrued as sociopathic but actually prizes cleverness, inventiveness, and

Dadaist absurdity as much as the destabilization of social and emotional expectations. This

convoluted dynamic is principled on the ludic rationality and anomic subversiveness that govern

the monomania for which the Joker is best known. As the Joker evolves from prankster to

psychopath to anomos personified, his character continually embodies the disrupter culture

intrinsic to both trickster mythology and contemporary phenomena such as hacker culture and

trolling. The success of modern disrupter culture is measured in “lulz,” most simply

characterized as pleasure derived from disturbing another’s emotional equilibrium (Schwartz,

2008, para. 8). As the central organizing logic of the Random - /b/ board of the imageboard

4chan1, “doing it for the lulz” mirrors the Joker ethos: it too seeks to transcend conventional

rules of engagement, interrogate restrictive order, create social disjuncture, and above all take

pleasure in provocation. Like Trickster, /b/ users expose the arbitrariness of social structures and

perpetuate online culture in doing so; like Joker, these users don’t require a motive or catalyst for

their actions or for the acquisition of lulz. The Joker ethos is thus an especially applicable

paradigm for understanding the 4channer as trickster-troll, especially on /b/, where trolling

1 The website 4chan, located at http://www.4chan.org, is a bulletin-board system for discussion and image-sharing. It is divided into approximately fifty themed discussion boards designated by letters within backslashes, such as Anime - /a/, Comics - /co/, and Random - /b/, where subject matter is literally random (“4chan FAQ,” n.d.)



behaviors evince the farcical, spectacular, aberrant, and creative elements inherent to both

Trickster and the Joker.

Before proceeding, I would like to distinguish between onsite and offsite Anonymous and

the dynamics of onsite and offsite lulz. The group identity “Anonymous” has been used to refer

to users of 4chan, as it is the default username and is employed by the majority of the population.

It has also been applied to the diffuse, low-density network of individuals from transgressive

spaces such as 4chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and Something Awful. More recently, the name

has been extended to include participants in social movements that originate or organize in

online spaces but also migrate to offline sites, adopting offline tactics while retaining online

cultural codes. As one such code, lulz is embedded in both online raids and offline social

movements like Project Chanology2 but is deployed differently in different environments.

Organized action undertaken by nonhierarchic collectives typically requires a unifying agenda,

for instance. By contrast, trolling on /b/ is generally perpetrated by one individual seeking to

outwit his fellow users through inventive deceptions and functions as a means of affirming and

rejuvenating the board’s culture. Accordingly, while offsite and offline lulz demonstrate

trickster properties, onsite lulz more closely recalls the Joker ethos due to the indefinite and

variable agendas of its perpetrators and emphasis on deception and culture-making.

I will therefore focus exclusively on trickster-trolling behavior on 4chan’s Random - /b/,

particularly its social engineering and discursive play given the Joker’s proclivity for such

2 Project Chanology is a protest movement targeting the Church of Scientology, launched by Anonymous in January 2008 in response to the Church’s attempted censorship of an interview with Tom Cruise. Anonymous’s preexisting anti-censorship sentiment, in conjunction with the Church’s history of similar censorship, underpins Project Chanology, but “initially Anonymous protested the Church simply because it was fucking fun to do so. In other words, they were doing it for the lulz” (Coleman & Brunton, 2010).



tactics. Where used, “Anonymous” will here refer to 4channers, and the insider term “/b/tards”

will refer to consistent users of /b/.

In order to provide a framework for examining the Joker as an exemplary trickster-troll, I

will first discuss folkloristics and the anomic, anti-normative culture of Random - /b/. I will

subsequently analyze representations of the Joker that illustrate the range of trickster-troll

positions he assumes, including Batman #251 (O’Neil & Adams, 1973), Batman #451 (Wolfman

& Aparo, 1990), Batman: The Killing Joke (Moore & Bolland, 1988), Arkham Asylum: A Serious

House on Serious Earth (Morrison & McKean, 1989), The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008), Joker

(Azzarello & Bermejo, 2008), and Batman: Digital Justice (Moreno, 1990).

For finesse players only: A folkloristic overview of Trickster

In mythology, the “finesse player” (Azzarello & Bermejo, 2008, p. 57) so often embodied

by the Joker is inevitably Trickster, variously characterized as deceitful, subversive, witty,

parodic, excessive, playful, and thieving (Hyde, 2010; Coleman & Brunton, 2010). Clever and

boundary-transgressing, Trickster chiefly relies on his silver tongue to evade or overturn nomos,

the codified set of external conventions that structures society (Berger, 1967, p. 22). Trickster’s

anomizing activity produces culture by rendering the polarities in our values transparent and

interrogable, exposing them as arbitrary and changeable.

According to mythographer William Doty (2000), myths reflect and reconceive social

manifestations of civilizing, ordering institutions, including cultural codes (p. 72). Within myth,

the trickster figure embodies “moral qualities that are the antipodes of expected behavior” (p.

191) through inversions of the ordinary and refractions that alternate between affirmation and



upheaval of the social order. In his carnivalesque clowning, Trickster highlights socioeconomic

disparities, as in Hermes’s recurrent ludic subversion of his brother’s lofty, undisputed authority

or Raven’s Robin Hood-like thievery of water and daylight from the heavens (Doty, 1993, p. 58-

60; Hyde, 2010, p. 6). While apparently “for the lulz,” Trickster’s actions often intentionally or

accidentally benefit culture: he disseminates the tools and knowledge of the upper echelons, à la

Coyote’s or Prometheus’s bestowal of fire or West African Legba’s gift of magical, medical

charms (Doty, 2000, p. 360). According to Doty (1993), Trickster “helps humans adjust by

stipulating social boundaries, even if he does so by metonymically transgressing them” (p. 56),

reorganizing the social sphere by randomizing boundaries, temporarily redistributing and

decentralizing power, and revealing the deceitfulness inherent to all nomizing social institutions.

As such, he is wholly generative, manufacturing culture and clarifying ethical behavior (p. 50,

55-57).

Nomizing activity, or the meaningful ordering of experience based on common social

meaning and its imposition on distinct individual experience, is one of the more critical functions

of society (Berger, 1967, p. 24-25). Nomos acts as a shield against fear and anxiety, permitting

members of society to deny their individual needs, problems, and concerns (p. 54). As a

decivilizing invertor, Trickster’s role is to unravel nomizing activity via representations that

obvert prohibitive mores and conventions. In Radin’s (1956) analysis of Native American

mythology, Trickster is creator and destroyer, deceiver and deceived, amoral in that he knows

neither good nor evil but catalyzes both (p. 155). It is Coyote’s impatient lust that ensures

mankind’s mortality and his tactlessness that humiliates and angers the People when he reigns as



Sun God for a day; but he is driven by his shameless, deceptive, insatiable nature, not by moral

impulses (Hyde, 2010, p. 89, 153).

Folklorist William Hynes (1993) compiled a matrix of six characteristics to more

accurately map Trickster’s persona. According to this heuristic guide, Trickster is ambiguous

and anomalous; deceiver and trick-player; shape-shifter; situation-invertor; messenger and

imitator; and sacred and lewd (p. 34). He expresses ambiguity through multivocality, evading

restrictive definition and transgressing cultural and epistemological boundaries. This enables

him to redistribute or remove division lines in an anomic fashion, as in Hermes’s promotion of

himself to Olympian status by sacrificing stolen sacred cattle (Hyde, 2010, p. 32). Although

Trickster is the cause and facilitator of disorder, he is just as often inadvertently his own victim,

as when Loki is caught in the salmon-trap he invents (p. 17). Even so, Trickster’s deceit

illuminates contradictions within the social sphere. Significantly, the victim or success of the

trick matter less than the trick-playing act itself. Trickster’s bodily appearance is fluid, as he

adopts disguises, physically morphs, or otherwise engages in identity deception, such as Raven’s

ability to become a cedar leaf and impregnate the chief’s daughter when she consumes the leaf

(p. 47). He is able to overturn any situation or belief system by inverting binaries of dominance

and subordination, as in Loki’s murder of Baldr, the underhandedness of which is directly

proportional to Frigg’s attempt to fight contingency with exaggerated control (p. 105-106).

Trickster mediates boundaries by breaking central taboos, though he does not always share the

fruits of his labor. Finally, he is marked by his creative, generative capacity for bricolage and

improvisation, frequently turning to wit and wordplay to diffuse his victims’ anger with “crafty

laughter” (Hynes, 1993, p. 34-37).



Anthropologists Coleman and Brunton (2010) suggest that the trickster ethos can be

found in contemporary hacker and troll subcultures. Like Trickster, hackers and trolls transgress

and redistribute boundaries; they interrogate notions of property; they are creative in their

communal argot, wordplay, and coding; they may be victimized by their own hubris; and they

overturn social and cultural codes, particularly binaries of good/evil and sacred/profane, through

impropriety, obscenity, and similarly sophomoric conduct (Levy, 2010, p. 27-38). A “hack” was

originally an activity undertaken for pleasure, not to fulfill a constructive goal (p. 10), much like

trickster behavior. Moreover, hackers’ penchant for discursive play mirrors Trickster’s linguistic

inversions and refractions, as Trickster manipulates the gods through puns, literality, and

prolixity, reminding them that they are superior only due to an arbitrary hierarchy. Similarly, the

social engineering tactics of hackers and trolls rely largely on convincing speeches, unexpected

wordplay, or ethically ambiguous deceit (Levy, 2010, p. 44, 95-96; Raymond, 2004). The

“finessing” activity of tricksters and hackers, then, adopts language as its mainstay, as in the

unpredictable word games of Hermes and 4channers, for whom words both disguise and clarify

meaning, or the Babelian muddying of languages enabled by Coyote, Raven, and 1337 sp34k3

and other forms of hacker and imageboard discourse (Hyde, 2010, p. 300; Raymond, 2004).

Tricksters like Coyote, Loki, and Hermes thus prefigure the ethic of /b/tards, for whom

social cues emerge through discourse, language play, linguistic multiplicity, and deceit to deflate

the egos of those they perceive as needing comeuppance. As such, the social engineering tactics

3 1337 sp34k or “leet speak,” derived from “elite speech,” is one such Babelian form of language in that it combines letters and numbers to form words. Accordingly, word units may be purely numerical, purely alphabetical, or some combination of both. Hacker discourse is also prone to verb doubling, such as “lose, lose”; rhyming and punning, where proper nouns like “Data General” become “Dirty Genitals” or “C#” becomes “C Flat”; and play with suffixes, as in “dubiosity,” “winnitude,” and the “verbing” of all nouns (Raymond, 2004).



of /b/tards parallels trickster behavior and manifests in the Joker’s attitude and actions. This is

further evident after a close examination of 4chan’s Random - /b/ board, which will better

contextualize the Joker ethos within the contemporary ideology of lulz.

For the lulz: The trickster-troll ethos from Usenet to /b/

Trolling, etymologically derived from “trawling,” dates back to the early days of Usenet,

a newsgroup community where usernames were required, albeit modifiable. Discussions in

Usenet groups were often prone to flames, or incendiary comments intended to manipulate

interactants’ responses. As an open-speech forum, the Usenet community not only tolerated

flaming but absorbed it into its social and administrative codes (Hardy, 1993). A mainstay of

troll rhetoric, flames and other lulzy tactics usually classify as social engineering behavior, and

on Usenet, rhetoric is the sole means of impression management and deceptive discourse,

wherein the goal is to be convincingly legitimate by assuming the roles of other typical authors,

such as the Questioner, the Answer Person, or the Cynic (Turner et al, 2006). In a decentralized

community like Usenet, flame wars serve as a simultaneous source of democratic debate, humor,

uncertainty management, identity construction, and the clarification of ethical values (Hardy,

1993). These trickster behaviors are amplified within the anonymous, decentralized,

nonhierarchical community on 4chan. The imageboard interface allows for the augmentation of

disrupter culture by implementation of visual shorthand and new dialects such as chanspeak to

heighten deceptive power and discursive playfulness.

Created in October 2003, 4chan is the largest English-language imageboard and the

flagship of the Western *chans, all of which are characterized by their unique ephemerality and



anonymity. 4chan lacks even the option of registration, and default usernames are

“Anonymous.” Although modifiable, this username is used by over 90% of users without the

provision of other identifying information. Users who adopt fluid or fixed identities are

denigrated as “namefags” and “tripfags” who fail to understand the site’s trickster-troll

subculture (Bernstein et al, 2011, p. 6), a holdover sentiment despite the recent mandatory

attachment of a unique ID tag to identify individual posters. Content automatically refreshes and

does so especially rapidly on Random - /b/, which receives approximately 30% of 4chan’s total

traffic of over one million unique users daily. The site lacks an archive, and expired content is

irrevocably deleted. Users may request to archive threads from /b/ to official repositories like

4chanarchive, though archiving is not guaranteed. Thus, users must rely on the sharing of

personal, private archives and collective memory to maintain the site’s history (p. 5-6), much

like oral tradition.

4chan’s primary purpose is image sharing and discussion; post content typically consists

of an image and accompanying text comment. Its deceptive discourse relies equally on both, as

photographs are employed to suggest authenticity and rhetoric is altered to typify 4chan

interactants, such as the Newfag4, the Advice Seeker, the Attention Whore, or the Troll.

Moreover, anonymity and fluid identity allow for trickster-trolls to feed their own threads

through “samefagging,” facilitating identity deception and Trickster-like fabulation. The

offensive nature of 4chan’s discourse inverts the sacred/lewd; death and rape are sources of

humor; enticing personal timestamped nudes or images of sexual activity fulfills both lust and

4 4chan operates under a culture of playful offense, where bigotry serves as a means to police and preserve the board’s exclusivism and impenetrability. As such, “fag” is suffixed to adjectives to describe various users. A new user becomes a “newfag”; an artist is a “drawfag”; a user who pretends to be different users is a “samefag” once discovered. On 4chan, the slur tends to promote camaraderie, except in ostracizing uses of “newfag” or “samefag.”



lulz. This trickster behavior occurs chiefly on the Random - /b/ board and is highly generative,

as /b/ is notorious for its prodigious meme production and linguistic development as well as its

transgressive practices, foremost among which are its disrupter culture and anomos. Its minimal

governance, coupled with 4chan’s deindividuating anonymity and dehistoricizing ephemerality,

facilitates identity deception and disrupter culture in the form of trickster-trolls.

Since the days of Usenet, the term “trolling” has acquired extremely negative

connotations and, as its byproduct, so has the lulz, or “how trolls keep score” (Schwartz, 2008,

para. 8). Trolling has been construed by trolls as being both discourse and online eugenics, a

form of rhetoric and means of morally adjudicating online behavior. As on Usenet, it has been

pervasive and permissible on /b/ since its inception, to the point that trolling on other 4chan

boards has been redirected to /b/ to contain it. However, Coleman (2011) stresses that lulz may

range from “lighthearted and amusing jokes, images, and pranks” (para. 5) to “ultra-coordinated

motherfuckary [sic]” (para. 6). On /b/, lulz is derived chiefly from achieving a sense of

intellectual superiority over fellow interactants, namely through social engineering of what are

perceived as overly self-important users.

Its social engineering tactics emphasize the language play characteristic of Trickster.

Frequent tricks include posting in the guise of an attractive woman describing her sexual

exploits, “bait-and-switch” stories whereby readers’ expectations are thwarted, or wordplay

based on puns or literality. Lulz is derived when interactants are fooled, humbled, or made

aware of the flimsy constructs ordering normative society. /b/’s strict insistence on anonymity,

for instance, demonstrates a post-identity ethic that illuminates the unequal weight we place on

gender and race as identity aspects offline. The Habbo Hotel raid, during which /b/ users created



black avatars and blocked access to a pool in a virtual hotel, was ostensibly “for the lulz” but

also responded to perceived racism on the part of Habbo’s admins (Knafo, 2012, The Godfather

section, para. 18).

Even routine discourse on /b/ is anomizing and unpredictable. Expressions of grief or

casual pleasantries are often met with requests for the user’s suicide. Even though the poster

may only be seeking acceptance, contrariness and lulz prevent users from ascribing to a social

framework beyond anomos. At the same time, the same expressions on a different date may be

treated compassionately. Users have threatened to kill themselves on /b/, seemingly as a cry for

help or out of sheer boredom, and have been encouraged to do so and broadcast it live. They

have planned or bragged about authentic school shootings or posed as shooters after the fact,

such as the Jokela High School shooting in Finland and the recent spree killing perpetrated by

James Holmes during the opening of The Dark Knight Rises (Anonymous, 2007a; James

Holmes, 2012). They have authored hoax bomb threats that the police misconstrued as

legitimate threats (Jake Brahm, 2012). They profess to masturbate to child pornography but use

social engineering to entrap potential pedophiles (Anonymous, 2007b). They participate in

offline activist movements such as Project Chanology. And even as they mail Christmas

presents to Joseph Fritzl, who raped and fathered seven children by his daughter, they mail

birthday cards to 90-year-old William Lashua, a random stranger who seemed lonely

(Anonymous 2010a; 2010b). /b/tards are also likely to champion individuals society classifies as

criminals, as in Modesto shooter James Ferrario, who killed a locksmith and a deputy rather than

face eviction (Anonymous, 2012a). The /b/tard who posted in the guise of Ferrario managed to

troll not only his peers but also Fox News. Finally, particularly lulzy incidents usually become



memes, prone to the wordplay characteristic of hacker discourse: for instance, “James Ferrario”

gave rise to a variant on “That really rustled my jimmies,”5 and the Virginia Tech massacre

became a riff on “VTEC just kicked in yo.”6

Evidently, among /b/tards acclimated to anti-normative behavior, onsite trolling shifts

from schadenfreude to trickster sociality extolling the ability to successfully dupe fellow users.

Such social engineering tendencies are readily apparent in the Joker’s character. In examining

the evolution of the Joker ethos, I will adopt Hynes’s (1993) heuristic approach to classify and

discuss Joker’s trickster-troll behavior following his Bronze Age revision.

“I’m not a monster; I’m just ahead of the curve”: The Joker as trickster-troll

Prosocial, antisocial, anomic, and never-too-literal, the Joker satisfies several of the

heuristics established by Hynes (1993, p. 34). First, he is always ambiguous and anomalous,

compelling his fellow criminals to read potential duplicity and double-meaning into his words

and actions. He eludes precise definition, recreating his persona daily. His ability to disconcert,

disrupt, and transgress reveals anarchy, danger, deceit, and arbitrariness in spaces of order and

safety: asylums, private homes, digital security systems, and executive staff rooms. However, he

is frequently a victim of his own hubris, often overlooking a crucial detail that inevitably leads

Batman to him. Third, his appearance is fluid, ranging from chemically-dyed skin to grease

5 This expression relates feelings of discomfort or discontent and, despite originating on Funnyjunk, appeared frequently on 4chan circa 2010. The meme consists of an image of a gorilla with the juxtaposed text, “That really rustled my jimmies” or “My jimmies remain unrustled” (basedchris – thankyoubasedgod, 2012). The James Ferrario version occurred when a /b/tard affectionately dubbed the shooter “Jimmy,” which morphed into “Jimmy Russell,” as his jimmies were apparently unrustled (Anonymous, 2012). 6 This meme, posted frequently on /b/ and /p/, refers to the sudden velocity experienced by a car with a VTEC motor. The Virginia Tech massacre version substitutes “Vtech” for “VTEC” and appeared largely on /b/ in the days following the shootings (Davidson, 2009).



paint, lipstick, and hair dye to facial scarring. As provocateur and saboteur, he is able to

overturn any scheme or hierarchical system of power and transgress the metaphysical lines

between good and evil and sanity and madness. Lastly, he is an inventive bricoleur, boundlessly

creative in his quests for gain and retribution.

Each of the Joker’s iterations demonstrates the range of trickster positions he occupies,

beginning in Batman #1, where his homicidal impulses are characterized as whimsical, brutal,

and inscrutable to others (Kane, 1940). Defanged by self-censorship and the Comics Code

Authority in the 1950s, however, he was reduced to nonviolent caprice. After committing a

rookie mistake during a heist – infamously dubbed “boner of the year” by Gotham’s media – he

vows to redeem his criminal reputation not through violence but rather through a series of crimes

patterned after historical blunders (Finger & Kane, 1951, p. 3-4). Notably, his only goal is the

acquisition of wealth and the nature of his crimes are playful and premised on wordplay.

Furthermore, the artwork depicts him as embarrassed or hysterical rather than menacing. Even

his eventual arsenal is comprised of gag weapons like exploding cigars and other pranks that

pose more of a nuisance than a threat (Vern & Sprang, 1952, p. 73).

After a brief disappearance in the 1960s, the Joker reemerged as an erratically sociopathic

and violent menace in Batman #251 (O’Neil & Adams, 1973). Significantly, this iteration is

marked by trickster logic. Here, the Joker’s trademark grin is often shown in close-up, his eyes

narrowed and his eyebrows maniacally arched, as he searches for his betrayers. His renewed

fierceness is underscored in a panel juxtaposing his visage beside a shark’s maw, two similar

rictuses (p. 16). However, his tone remains deceptively humorous, nonchalant, and indulgent

even alongside vicious imagery, as when he gives a cigar to an ex-henchman as a show of



goodwill. The henchman, assuming he is one step ahead, assumes it is a gag cigar. However,

this time the gag demonstrates Joker’s punitive trickster literality, as the cigar contains

nitroglycerin (p. 6-7). Later, when he has Batman at his mercy, he lets him live, famously

understanding that the objective is the game itself, not victory. Finally, trickster-like, he is

thwarted by his own choice of battlegrounds: the oil-polluted beach where he slips during his

escape (p. 22).

Madness is also complicated in the Joker’s reemergence. When Batman accuses Joker of

being hopelessly insane, the disjuncture between those words and Joker’s goal to highlight

invisible social constructs becomes exceedingly apparent. Foucault (2001) construes madness as

the elusion of extant social tactics, strategies, and realities and the ultimate rejection of restrictive

cultural codes and social definition (p. vii, 8-29). Trickster’s anti-normative behavior is often

construed by his compeers as madness; however, his break from conformity and abnegation of

reason serve as the ultimate evasion of cultural codes. Just as Batman #251 (O’Neil & Adams,

1973) hints, madness is not pure psychopathy but anomizing activity demarcating a liminal space

free from social constraint (Foucault, 2001, p. 8-9) – the space inhabited by Trickster.

This view of trickster madness is explicitly taken in Batman #451 (Wolfman & Aparo,

1990), where Joker experiences an existential crisis – a phase of being constrained by the

individual problems typically managed by nomizing institutions, such as fear, pain, anguish, and

self-doubt, resulting in a loss of trickster finesse. In his absence, a false Joker appears: “yuppie

Wall Street wizard” Curtis Base (p. 5), who, in carnivalesque fashion, relishes the freedom of

liminal madness. Base declares himself the superior Joker because “insanity prevents [the real

Joker] from being a success” (p. 19) and he himself is “quite sane” (p. 20); however, by clinging



to the binary of sane/insane, itself a nomizing cultural code, he proves himself incapable of truly

escaping social constraint, unlike the real Joker. The Joker properly resumes his criminal role by

escaping social constraint – renouncing the fears and anxieties created and managed by nomizing

institutions – after which he is pronounced mad and committed to Arkham Asylum. Thus, the

Joker’s madness is equated not with clinical insanity but with the total rejection of nomos.

Importantly, Curtis Base fails to achieve that stature due to his profound

misunderstanding of the Joker ethos. He is unremittingly monomaniacal in his desire to kill

Batman, focused on the goal rather than the process. He is also unwilling to fully surrender his

yuppie identity (Wolfman & Aparo, 1990, p. 20). By contrast, the Joker has no fixed, socially-

regulated persona to offset his criminal identity. In reclaiming this identity, he emphasizes

means and not ends, and in a pivotal scene extorts a criminal for information about Base and

rewards him with a cigar. The criminal panics, assuming it contains nitroglycerin. As Joker

walks away, he confidently muses, “Ordinary cigar. Never give ’em what they expect”

(Wolfman & Aparo, 1990, p. 8). The panel perspective echoes its Batman #251 referent. This

underscores the Joker’s anomic subversiveness, suggesting that Joker’s trickster traits are what

enable him to inspire fear.

The Joker’s trickster traits are especially evident in the recursive imagery and dialogue in

The Killing Joke (Moore & Bolland, 1988), where the Joker is literally constructed through acts

of doubling, reflexivity, and refraction. Flashbacks are signaled in reflections, broken concentric

ripples, and the twinning of figures, postures, and backdrops. The title itself is multifaceted,

toying with literality as it suggests a joke about killing or a joke that literally kills. The dialogue

is disorganized and initially eschews rational order, as in the framing device, “There were these



two guys in a lunatic asylum” (p. 3): first juxtaposed with Batman and a false Joker and later

revealed as the joke that allows Batman and the real Joker to experience a moment of strange

camaraderie, further problematizing the nomizing dichotomy of law and criminality (p. 45).

Significantly, the comic’s entire premise is disruption through schadenfreude, a

trademark trickster pursuit. The Joker attempts to induce madness in Jim Gordon by staging

“one bad day” (p. 38), paralyzing Barbara Gordon and caging Gordon at a whimsical, horrifying

carnival where he forced to witness images of her injury. The use of the carnival is noteworthy

as it is touted as a liminal trickster space. There, the Joker philosophizes about the arbitrariness

of social control mechanisms, arguing that a mad world necessitates the denial of reason (p. 21-

25). However, he contradicts himself through his own susceptibility to reason and memory, as

his own past is woven into the present action. Moreover, although he verbally promotes

madness, he is visually portrayed in defined, ordered lines, with clear eyes and a grin teetering

between comical and innocent. His homicidal tendencies are jovial in tone: his Joker venom is

delivered through a hand buzzer, and the flower in his lapel squirts acid. His stagecraft even

recalls trick-playing, as he costumes himself as a Hawaiian tourist before shooting and

photographing Barbara and invites freak-show workers to gape at the imprisoned Gordon,

inverting notions of ordinary and abnormal. He only fails to triumph because, in trickster

fashion, he is victim of his own gag: his gun, out of bullets, emits a flag (p. 43).

Although schadenfreude is the means, the Joker’s ultimate goal is to highlight arbitrary

social disparities. He deflates the unwarranted self-importance of the average man by terming

him “physically unremarkable,” noting his “deformed sense of values [and] hideously bloated

sense of humanity’s importance, the club-footed social conscience and the withered optimism



[and] its frail and useless notions of order and sanity” (Moore & Bolland, 1988, p. 33). He then

insists that Batman too operates within madness, attempting to force an admission that life and

struggling do not make sense (p. 38-39). This evokes Trickster’s insistence on exposing the

flimsiness of the nomizing constructs around which civilization coheres, much like /b/tards, who

also position themselves in opposition to ordinary individuals.

Where The Killing Joke (Moore & Bolland, 1988) presents a Joker whose Job-like

suffering motivates his social experiments, Arkham Asylum (Morrison & McKean, 1989) offers a

nightmarish Joker who, as chaotic as he seems, is also rational, although his rationale may make

sense to him alone. Here, the Joker entices Batman into the asylum over an April Fool’s prank,

manipulating Batman by suggesting he is gouging out a girl’s eyes. Visually, his words are

arranged nonlinearly, in scratchy red lettering that stands out from the page, as he describes his

sharpened pencil and the girl’s eyes, correctly anticipating that Batman will infer incorrectly (p.

9-10). The phrase “April Fool” recurs throughout the graphic novel, conflating lighthearted

pranks with the deadly gravity of a nullified social system: for instance, the Joker relates a joke

about a man whose wife died giving birth to their spastic baby and then shoots an orderly in the

head at the punchline, theatrically lamenting, “Get it? Oh, what a senseless waste of human

life!” (p. 42). The juxtaposition of his nightmarish visage with humor that layers abstraction and

literality again recalls trickster behavior meant to overturn expectations.

Additionally, McKean’s artwork renders the Joker as trickster-fluid, hallucinatory and

dreamlike in attitude and shape. His hair flows wildly, starkly bright and inexplicably defying

wind and gravity. His face, often drawn in close-up, ranges from overshadowed to overexposed,

the former intimating violence, the latter suggesting volatility and comical lunacy. His



coloration is often stippled or incomplete, as though he is perpetually in the process of

disintegration and reformation; his figure also frequently bleeds across borders or off the page,

literally transgressing boundaries. Compounding these trickster aspects, the Joker ethos is

verbally explicated as such his psychiatrist, who describes his psychopathy as “super-sanity” (p.

29). Where “sanity” previously suggested the ability to perceive in accordance with cultural

codes, the addition of “super” implies that this common “sanity” has been replaced by a superior

form, in which perception and processing are completely ungoverned and unconstrained:

[It is] a brilliant new modification of human perception, more suited to urban life at the

end of the twentieth century. Unlike you and I, the Joker seems to have no control over

the sensory information he’s receiving from the outside world. That’s why some days

he’s a mischievous clown, others a psychopathic killer. He has no real personality. He

creates himself each day. He sees himself as lord of misrule, and the world as a theater of

the absurd. (Morrison & McKean, 1989, p. 29-30)

This not only accords with Trickster’s fluidity and transgressive capabilities but also positions

him as operating under logics that lie beyond society’s purview. This is what allows Trickster to

manufacture and reshape culture.

This portrayal starkly contrasts with the Batman #451 iteration. As such, Arkham Asylum

(Morrison & McKean, 1989) seems to mark a turning point in the Joker’s evolution as a trickster

in that his psychosis is recast as an anti-normative but acceptable alternative to conventional

social tactics and cultural codes. Like Trickster, he is constantly processing, interpreting, and

toying with his world in dynamic, visually vibrant, and transformative ways. The notion of

super-sanity itself correlates to information processing online, where individuals are inundated



with arbitrarily and chaotically placed material that results in sensory overload in the absence of

active filtering (Ullman, 2012, p. 79-81). The Joker’s trickster persona thus shifts towards a

more obvious manifestation of contemporary digital ethos, namely that of lulz.

The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008) and Joker (Azzarello & Bermejo, 2008) best exemplify

this by centralizing social engineering and anomizing lulzy tactics. Expanding on the social

engineering experiment in The Killing Joke (Moore & Bolland, 1988), The Dark Knight’s

(Nolan, 2008) Joker sports creased makeup, deep-set eyes, stringy hair, and a Glasgow smile he

licks as a tic or for emphasis. He underscores fear-mongering, his social engineering tactics an

equal blend of humor and amorality. He buries a pencil in a man’s head as a magic trick, and

places a gag grenade in the mouth of a Mafia henchman, recalling the gag cigar of Batman #451

(Wolfman & Aparo, 1990, p. 8). He dismisses pain with laughter, providing commentary on his

own beatings; he is disconcertedly self-assured; and, Trickster-like, he alters his history based on

his circumstances. He is prone to wordplay and literality, as when he drops Rachel Dawes from

a penthouse window when Batman demands he “let her go” (Nolan, 2008). He characterizes his

ethos in the language of Trickster and lulz, as he takes great pleasure in “show[ing] the schemers

how pathetic their attempts to control things really are” (Nolan, 2008).

Much of the film focuses on the Joker’s use of Trickster methods in his social

engineering of Harvey Dent’s downfall, and his actions, while apparently psychopathic, are

extremely well-reasoned, ultimately interrogating people’s trusting nature. His rhetoric mirrors

trolling maneuvers such as flaming, manipulative wording, and outright deception. He tricks

Batman into saving Dent instead of Rachel, anticipating that Batman would go after Rachel and

deceitfully switching their locations after stating that he could only save one. Later, Joker



convinces Dent of the superiority of the Joker ethos, socially engineering Dent’s response by

falsely representing himself as lacking schemes and, like Dent, as victimized by schemers. He

apologizes with apparent sincerity and gives Dent a gun, instructing him to unbalance the

established order and introduce chaos, the ultimate form of fairness (Nolan, 2008) and a favorite

lair of Trickster.

Intended to persuade Dent, this rhetoric also highlights the Joker’s trickster-troll penchant

for revealing moral contradictions in society. It also illustrates his indifference about his own

survival, as Dent flips a coin to determine his fate, a moment of pure contingency that apparently

excites him (Nolan, 2008). This ethos is taken up by /b/tards, who treat suicide and homicide

with equal flippancy, who often reveal hypocritical prejudices in social institutions, and who, due

to 4chan’s ephemerality, must find pleasure in contingency. The Joker reminds Batman

repeatedly that his rules, anger, and strength are meaningless in the face of an anomic,

disordering attitude. This trickster logic recurs in Joker’s final social engineering experiment,

when he pits two boatloads of people against one another. Although the tactic fails, his final

scene depicts him laughing as he nearly plummets to his death, seemingly deranged but having

just revealed his capabilities for rational planning (Nolan, 2008).

Similarly, Azzarello & Bermejo’s (2008) Joker disrupts social assumptions concerning

sanity and social order. Joker (Azzarello & Bermejo, 2008) is told from the viewpoint of Joker’s

henchman, Jonny, who tries to emulate him and eventually dies realizing the Joker is “a disease”

(p. 120). The semi-photorealistic art depicts Joker with ropy scars and dark creases on his face.

He is whimsical and oddly paternal, heightening the impact of his brutal acts, such as flaying a

man alive or embedding razor fragments into his fingers as a stealth weapon (p. 20-22, 96). He



trades a gun for a blanket-wrapped shovel to fool armed pursuers, a deceptive tactic akin to

Trickster’s improvisatory skill (p. 8-9). He plays Russian roulette with himself for no apparent

reason, underscoring the diminished significance of the life/death binary in his worldview (p.

49). He is continually contradictory, hinting that he is no stranger to psychosis while

formulating rational, complex plans. He mentions having taken pills, and one panel portrays him

surrounded by spilled medication (p. 90). Shortly thereafter, Jonny recognizes that the Joker

never suffered from madness; rather, he is an anomic, amoral force being exercised on all of

Gotham (p. 119-122). Correspondingly, the Riddler warns the Joker that the safest place to hide

is “in sanity,” a pun that suggests the Joker is not currently mad and that madness is safer than

nomos (Azzarello & Bermejo, 2008, p. 79). In the end, the Joker expresses disgust at Jonny’s

inability to finesse. He shoots Jonny in the chin, and Jonny climbs over the bridge and falls to

his death after realizing that the disease is “you,” incurable, older than civilization itself (p. 113-

122). This disease may be read as anomos, as the Joker is characterized as a being that is

inherently deceptive, simultaneously clever and unthinking, magnetic, and untrustworthy.

While The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008) and Joker (Azzarello & Bermejo, 2008) seem

most representative of the trickster-troll ethos, Digital Justice (Moreno, 1990) predictively

summates trolling and lulz as they occur online. Moreno (1990) crafts a technologically

deterministic narrative that prefigures the dichotomies presently surrounding digitality:

material/symbolic, organic/artificial, and online/offline. However, these binaries become

blurred, suggesting that online ethoses can be exported offline, just as the symbolic order of the

online world can directly remake the material order of the offline world. This is a panoptic

Gotham where knowledge is alternative currency nevertheless worth more than money, and



digital truth and justice are distinct from offline legal systems. Power is completely

decentralized, as on /b/.

Although it is the seeming anomaly in Joker’s evolution as Trickster, Digital Justice

(Moreno, 1990) is noteworthy in that it is one of the first computer-generated comics and it

positions Joker as a trickster virus: pure code, fickle, megalomaniacal, and “the world’s first and

finest digital genius” (p. 87). He is portrayed as a grinning mouth on myriad screens; while this

appears comical, the servos he controls destroy people grotesquely and graphically, and he is

possessed of eugenic tendencies that may be likened to lulz as a policing function on /b/. Like

Coyote, who lacks an intrinsic nature but as an imitator acquires a repertoire of ways (Hyde,

2010, p. 43), this Joker’s fabulations and adaptations are unending. He proves himself to be

infinitely versatile in a ceaselessly changing world, easily transitioning from physically-

embodied criminality to infecting Wall Street’s computer systems (Moreno, 1990, p. 66). He lies

about authoring the Joker virus even while openly admitting he will use it to control Gotham.

The virus spreads until it infiltrates the Net’s core and controls the integrated political and media

centers, enabling the Joker virus to “edit reality” by disseminating false news and entertainment

to subdue Gotham’s citizens (p. 85). Deception also plays a major role in his battle with Batman,

as the Joker edits reality by deleting the deaths of Batman’s parents and noting that memories are

equal to identity (p. 92)

Additionally, this Joker, more so than his other incarnations, is able to mediate and cross

the ontological boundaries separating earthly reality from other planes of existence (Hynes,

1993, p. 34-37). Like Hermes and Coyote, who are credited with mediating the boundary

between life and death (Hyde, 2010, p. 40), Joker’s existence as pure code allows him to control



the Net and influence reality. During his battle with the Batman program, which occurs via

circuitry, he even exerts a direct force on reality, merging the material and the symbolic in the

manner of Trickster. He imposes his will on meatspace, causing the skies to swirl and shift in

coloration and texture as he quips, “other artists dabbled paint on canvas but I work in reality

itself” (p. 87). He even temporarily absorbs Gordon’s corporeal, wetware body into the

immaterial world of the Net (Moreno, 1990, p. 86-87). As Gordon digitizes, he is briefly

“caught between realities – part flesh, part pure code…then he resolves into something that is

neither” (p. 90). Thus, the Joker virus inhabits the liminal area between civilization and the

unknown, just as Trickster exists between town and forest, spaces of anomos.

Although the battle concludes with the deletion of the Joker virus and the Batman

program, the protagonists are ambivalent about this victory, believing that humanity’s

overreliance on technology could easily encourage a return to the Joker’s vision of the Net

(Moreno, 1990, p. 95). They agree that man and machine are interdependent but that physically-

embodied heroes are needed to police future threats to the Net (p. 96). This suggests that

technology would remain the realm of the trickster without such policing, precluding idealism,

empathy, and civility. From this technologically deterministic standpoint, the online,

disembodied trickster-troll is anomos personified and cannot coexist with nomizing impulses of

any kind. Whether intentionally or not, the Joker virus represents the living embodiment of the

experience of information processing in media environments with a rapid, incessant, and

ephemeral information stream, like /b/, where decentralization, fluid identity, and hive-mind

presence are unified through trickster-troll practices meant to destabilize arbitrary and deceitful

social frames of reference.



Conclusion

The use of these trickster characteristics attributes multifaceted meaning to the Joker’s

character and motivations. In essence, the Joker ethos not only constitutes “doing it for the lulz”

but also encompasses the full range of anti-normative behavior that governs 4chan’s /b/.

Correspondingly, /b/ is best represented through the trickster motif and is most compatible with

the Joker, who occupies the greatest range of positions within the trickster archetype and opposes

nomizing social order and vigilante forces that are not truly beyond the system. In particular, the

extreme emphasis on anonymity and heightened ephemerality on /b/ construct the space as a site

of anomos, the converse of nomizing activity that constructs a stable and predictable social frame

of reference. The Joker seeks to similarly destabilize normative social frameworks via trickster

behavior, which comprises the Joker ethos.

Perhaps the greatest significance of this particular reading of the Joker ethos is the

contested tenability of exporting the Joker ethos beyond particular liminal spaces, be it Arkham

Asylum or /b/. While trolling must be successful when performed offsite in order to achieve

lulz, the Joker exports this ethic out of necessity: to show those who are not madhouse inmates

that the real madhouse is out there, in the real world (Morrison & McKean, 1989, p. 100). The

Joker’s purpose, ultimately, is not to triumph over the social institutions he renders transparent;

rather, by repeatedly testing Batman and civilizing principles of society, he compels us to the

reassess nomizing, socially structuring activity we take for granted. As such, viewing lulz on /b/

as a subset of the Joker ethos may fruitfully complicate the debate about the political and

resistive uses of lulz in offline contexts, illuminating trolling as fundamentally trickster behavior.



Works Cited

4chan FAQ (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.4chan.org/faq

Anonymous (2007a). jokela high school shooting – pt. 2. 4chanarchive - /b/. Retrieved from

http://4chanarchive.org/brchive/dspl_thread.php5?thread_id=44682385&x=jokela+highs

chool+shooting+-+pt.2

Anonymous (2007b). brb church – chris forcand. 4chanarchive - /b/. Retrieved from

http://4chanarchive.org/brchive/dspl_thread.php5?thread_id=42828652&x=brb+church+-

+chris+forcand

Anonymous. (2010a). ITT: We send Joseph Fritzl Christmas cards. 4chanarchive - /b/.

Retrieved from http://4chanarchive.org/brchive/dspl_thread.php5?thread_id=291118151

Anonymous. (2010b). William Lashua’s birthday party. 4chanarchive - /b/. Retrieved from

http://4chanarchive.org/brchive/dspl_thread.php5?thread_id=269531408

Anonymous (2012). James H Ferrario. Chanarchive - /b/. Retrieved from

http://chanarchive.org/4chan/b/42240/

Azzarello, B. & Bermejo, L. (2008). Joker. New York: DC Comics, Inc.



basedchris – thankyoubasedgod (2012). That really rustled my jimmies. Know Your Meme.

Retrieved from http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/that-really-rustled-my-jimmies

Bernstein, M.S., Monroy-Hernández, A., Harry, D., André, P., Panovich, K. & Vargas, G.

(2011). 4chan and /b/: An analysis of anonymity and ephemerality in a large online

community. Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.

Retrieved from http://projects.csail.mit.edu/chanthropology/4chan.pdf

Berger, P. (1967). The sacred canopy: Elements of a sociological theory of religion. Garden

City: Doubleday Publishing Group.

Coleman, G. & Brunton, F. (2010, July 17). A user’s guide to lulzy media, the pleasure of

trickery, and the politics of spectacle: from Luddites to Anonymous [audio file].

Retrieved from http://9continents.s3.amazonaws.com/lulz.zip.

Coleman, G. (2011). Anonymous: From the lulz to collective action. The New Everyday.

Retrieved from http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/tne/pieces/anonymous-lulz-

collective-action

Davidson, D. (2009). VTEC just kicked in, yo! Know Your Meme. Retrieved from

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/vtec-just-kicked-in-yo



Doty, W. G. (1993). A lifetime of trouble-making: Hermes as trickster. In W. J. Hynes & W. G.

Doty (Eds.), Mythical trickster figures: Contours, contexts, criticisms (p. 46-65).

Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.

Doty, W. G. (2000). Mythography: The study of myths and rituals. Tuscaloosa: The University

of Alabama Press.

Finger, B. & Kane, B. (1951, August). Batman #66. New York: Detective Comics.

Foucault, M. (2001). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. New

York: Routledge Classics.

Hardy, H. (1993). The history of the Net, v. 8.1.2. Retrieved from http://w2.eff.org/Net_culture/

net.history.txt

Hyde, L. (2010). Trickster makes this world: Mischief, myth, and art. New York: Farrar, Straus,

and Giroux.

Hynes, W. J. (1993). Mapping the characteristics of mythic tricksters: A heuristic guide. In W. J.

Hynes & W. G. Doty (Eds.), Mythical trickster figures: Contours, contexts, criticisms (p.

33-45). Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.



Jake Brahm (2012). Encyclopedia Dramatica. Retrieved from https://encyclopediadramatica.se/

Jake_Brahm

Kane, B. & Finger, B. (1940, Spring). Batman #1. New York: Detective Comics.

Knafo, S. (2012). Anonymous and the war over the Internet. Retrieved from

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/30/anonymous-internet-war_n_1233977.html

Levy, S. (2010). Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Moore, A. & Bolland, B. (1988). Batman: The killing joke. New York: DC Comics.

Moreno, P. (1990). Batman: Digital justice. New York: DC Comics.

Morrison & McKean (1989). Arkham asylum: A serious house on serious earth. New York: DC

Comics.

Nolan, C. (Producer, Director). (2008). The Dark Knight [Motion picture.] U.S.: Legendary

Pictures.

O’Neil, D. & Adams, N. (1973, September). Batman #251. New York: Detective Comics.



Radin, P. (1956). The trickster: A study in American Indian mythology. New York: Bell

Publishing Co., Inc.

Raymond, E. (2004). The jargon file, v.4.47. Retrieved from http://catb.org/jargon/html/

index.html

James Holmes posted on 4chan 2 days before attack (2012). Redditpics. Retrieved from

http://www.redditpics.com/james-holmes-posted-on-4chan-2-days-before-attack,987284/

Schwartz, M. (2008). The trolls among us. The New York Times. Retrieved from

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?pagewanted=all

Turner, T. C., Smith, M. A., Fisher, D. & Welser, H. T. (2005). Picturing Usenet: Mapping

computer-mediated collective action. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication,

10(0). doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2005.tb00270.x

Ullman, E. (2012). Close to the machine: Technophilia and its discontents. New York: Picador.

Vern, D. & Sprang, D. (1952, October). Batman #73. New York: Detective Comics.

Wolfman, M. & Breyfogle, N. (1990, July). Batman #451. New York: Detective Comics.

since his bronze age revision, the joker has -

Documents