Abstract
Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke is one of the most popular Batman comic stories, and it is considered one of the greatest Joker stories of all time. The story finds the Joker kidnapping Commissioner Jim Gordon and psychologically torturing him. He does so in order to prove that the world is an absurd and unjust place, and in response to the injustices of the world, one should reject reason and order in favor of irrationality, chaos, and madness. The graphic novel asks readers to consider whether or not the Joker is right – that the only way to live in an absurd world is to be absurd and “go mad” – and whether people like Batman and Gordon are in denial, not only about the world, but about their own ability to remain rational in an absurd world.
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Brake, M. (2024). The Joker as Philosopher: Killing Jokes. In: Kowalski, D.A., Lay, C., S. Engels, K. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Popular Culture as Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24685-2_92
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