The Joker of the Batman comics was recently voted the greatest villain of all time. He is the first comic-book villain to get a film of his own, that film became the most successful of its subgenre ever, and the Joker has become a cultural icon.
Truth be told, ever since playing cards we have sensed that the joker, the court jester, is stronger than everyone — he sits above the king, the queen and the jack.
How is it that the Joker, stripped of weapons and authority, defeats the all-powerful king?
Because the court jester holds a power greater than the king’s. The king is bound by the rules — even if he himself can change them. But the jester scorns the rules. He is above them. They do not interest him. In the story of the princess who wanted the moon, the king, with all his might and all his advisers, cannot bring the moon down for the princess. But the cunning jester thinks in an entirely different way — one that does not run along the accepted rules — and so he manages to bring the princess her moon.
The Joker of the Batman comics is the strongest villain precisely because he has no power at all. He is not interested in money, not in revenge, or in special weapons, or in ruling Gotham City like the ambitions of the other comic-book villains. All that interests him is creating chaos. Mayhem for its own sake. For the sake of chaos itself. To show everyone that they are living a lie. That the solid ground is an illusion. That any good person can turn into a predatory beast under the right conditions.
And still: why did he, of all villains, become the best loved?
We live in the postmodern age. And the subtext of this age says: in everything there is a grain of falsehood. There is no single truth — or more precisely, there is no truth at all. Doubt everything.
Modernity strained to find order in everything. So it was in science, and so it was in the ideologies born of the modern era. Call it the generation of the “isms”: socialism, capitalism, communism, Nazism. Each system claimed to hold the one answer that would bring healing to humanity. But after the Second World War and the enormous disillusionment with the dubious order that all those ideologies had tried to impose, the postmodern era began — an era afraid of seeking a single truth. It had already seen where people who believed they possessed the whole truth had led: to the greatest bloodbath in history.
And the Joker is a postmodern product in its purest form. He is the alter ego of postmodern culture. He shouts aloud what postmodernism whispers in subtext. It’s all a lie! shouts the Joker. Fuck it all! The trauma-stricken Joker (the comics never give a clear answer as to what his trauma was) is the alter ego of a humanity grief-stricken by the world wars. And at that battered humanity he wants to scream: You are all liars! There is no truth — stop searching for it!
I know all sorts of answers to postmodernism. Fundamentalist answers that, unable to cope, call for turning back, or conservative answers that take the good and sift out the bad. But to my mind, the best answer was given by the teaching of Hasidism, headed by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov — who seemed to foresee the postmodern era, so full of despair of the world.
Rabbi Nachman has a character who reminds me very much of the Joker — but as his mirror image.
It is the simpleton, the Tam, from Rabbi Nachman’s tale “The Wise Man and the Simpleton” (if you have not read it, please run and read it — one of the greatest stories in Jewish literature).
The Tam could easily pass for the world’s court jester. He imagines that bread with salt is a gourmet meal, he wears rags he sincerely believes are fine coats, he makes rather crooked shoes and is certain they are perfection itself, he is always happy and smiling, and many take him for the village fool. For a jester.
But how wondrous it is that in every conversation he opens with someone, the first thing he says is: “Just no mockery!” That is — do not jest with me. I am happy, but not bitterly, cynically happy. If you wish to joke at my expense — go ahead, but then prove you are a bigger fool than I am. If you want an honest conversation — here I am. I am seeking truth.
And so we come to know the figure of the “Tam,” who also scorns the accepted rules — but in a 180-degree reversal of the Joker: not in order to expose the point of falsehood in everything, but in order to expose the point of truth in everything.
This shines through in the Tam’s most beautiful line, which I have already made a fixture on my own tongue. Whenever he is compared to someone else, he immediately says: “That is his deed, and this is my deed.” I am me, he is he. No comparisons. There is truth with him — and there is truth with me. For the rest, you are invited to read the tale itself.
And that is Hasidism’s answer to postmodernism. And it is so beautiful. Hasidism does not fight it head-on. It says that, at the end of the day, postmodernism brought great tidings to the world. Its central theme just needs one small twist.
Postmodernism says: in everything there is a grain of falsehood.
Hasidism says: in everything there is a grain of truth.
Very similar — very different.
Not the bitter venom of mockery that seeks to expose the lie in everything, but the innocent joy that reveals the kernel of truth in everything. “In all your ways know Him.” In everything.
Rabbi Nachman’s Tam is the Joker in his Jewish form.
What a sweet Joker he is.
