The Weird, Wacky World of Motivational Joker Memes

The genius of Joker, Bat-man’s greatest villain, is that he’s everything to everyone. Depending on the generation and the incarnation he’s an anarchist or a madman, a clown or a comedian, a camp goofball or a Hot Topic nu-metal goon. 

In the mesmerizingly banal world of memes Joker has been re-born anew in a surreally inappropriate yet bizarrely inevitable role: life coach, dispenser of wise aphorisms anonymously sourced from places like Jokerguruwizdom Quotes and Villain Memez. 

This might seem counter-intuitive. Joker is not exactly Deepak Chopra, after all.

I suppose that Joker is successful in the sense that in most iterations he runs a thriving criminal operation but he’s not someone I would pattern my life after, what with him being the embodiment of pure evil and all. 

In the world of inspirational memes, however, Joker has been re-imagined as the profane, irreverent voice of wisdom, the sage down at the end of the bar with a whiskey on the rocks in one hand and an unfiltered cigarette in the other who learned more from the school of hard knocks than he could at any Ivy League graduate school. 

I’m not exactly sure what it is about Joker that makes meme-smiths think that his ghoulish visage automatically lends quotes more authority but a lot of folks inexplicably think a randomly chosen image of Heath Ledger or Joaquin Phoenix looking moody and sad is just what’s needed to give their meme some pizazz. 

The ubiquity of other Gods of the meme world is more understandable. Minions, for example, almost instantly became synonymous with child-like mirth and sassiness, in memes and the world at large. Sam Elliott, meanwhile, became the voice of boomer condescension, forever enjoying a hearty chuckle at the expense of those crazy-haired millennials, with their safe spaces and trigger warnings. But I’m not entirely sure why Joker has been aggressively re-purposed as a profane poet doling out harsh but essential life lessons.

The Joker motivational meme group that I belong to recently gently prodded new members to earn our keep by dropping our own Joker inspirational quotes and liking and commenting aggressively.

This Joker motivational meme life ain’t no joke! There’s a chance I will get so deep into the game that it’ll be impossible for me to get out. 

Maybe Joker motivational meme people will be my new tribe. We’ll bond over our reverence for our shared guru, the Joker, the clown prince of crime and our own personal shaman. The tough love Joker doles out in memes is the only love we’ll ever need.

Poor Heath Ledger. He deserves so much better than to be roped into constant posthumous service as a prolific source of dumbass faux-profundities, “edgy” online versions of the quotes you find on Successories posters. 

#OnBrand #TheJokerwoulddefinitelysaythat

Joaquin Phoenix is similarly doomed to serve as the sad-eyed face of a thousand inane online witticisms. What a terrible, tacky price to pay for the runaway success of a terrible, tacky performance in a terrible, tacky film. 

The Joker meme group that I belong to currently has 185,000 members, or roughly 184,000 more than my Facebook group, Society for the Toleration of Nathan Rabin. That means that almost two hundred times as many people would rather seek wisdom from a fictional homicidal maniac than discuss my life’s work with like-minded souls. 

A group called Joker Quotes has 1.2 million members. That’s right: 1,200,000 people all joined a group so they could share and enjoy Joker quotes. That’s a depressingly impressive number but the group is perversely light on actual Joker memes and full of memes involving, for example, the character of Peaky Blinders from the television show of the same name.

When it comes to advice, however, Peaky Blinders won’t make anyone forget Confucius or Joker.

That’s how it should be. I’m a weird niche cult artist and Joker is one of our culture’s preeminent pop philosophers and thinkers. I understand he’s also involved in the world of crime, but judging from these memes, these wonderful memes, that very much appears to be a secondary pursuit. 

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Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of  THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang! 

Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here