There are few episodes of Batman where the Joker is not predetermined to boast some form of victory, laughing uproariously in the face of death or defeat. In his otherworldly resilience and archetypical presence as Batman’s inverse in morals and mannerisms, he seems more ethereal than human, and this simultaneously promotes mythical readings of the characters’ never-ending power-struggle and supplants any stab at realistically looking at the nature of evil with an iconographic abstract of a character that resembles Hannibal Lector in his apparent immortality and undeniable enticement.
The New Adventures of Batman represents a period in the Joker’s animated history where his supernatural ghastliness is whittled down significantly to expose a more whimsically human specimen who just happens to be Gotham’s most notorious psychopath. In Joker’s Millions he is just as much a victim of plot twists and surprises as the rest of the characters, no longer equipped with his usual unconditional and unexplainable superiority to the laws of chance and physics and life in general. Paul Dini intersperses his script with comical suggestions of the Joker’s non-mythical existence, a whirligig examination of the many vicissitudes of a working-class criminal. Strapped for cash, a tenant at the down-and-out Chelsea Arms apartment building, and oddly vulnerable, the Joker reveals yet a new dimension to his usual plastered-smile extravagance that comes with Dini’s love of creating sit-com scenarios and familiarizing his favorite characters within their comparatively down-to-earth contexts.
Complementing the light-hearted plotline is an unprecedented barrage of tricks and veneers that elevates Millions from the buddy comedy likes of Harley and Ivy or the Honeymooners lampooning of Harlequinade to an embrace of 90s comedy customs. As such, the feeling is less screwball and more contemporary. Not only are there freeze-frame gags and subtle background touches à la The Simpsons, but the satire of political corruption that manifests in ironic, deadpan delivery and digs at topical controversies (the appearance of a Johnnie Cochran caricature seems to associate the Joker with O. J. Simpson) is similarly modern in its jaded deprecation. And yet the pace is so jumpy that these drive-by political jabs mesh within a jovial schema of colorful montages and cartoon vivacity. In short, Dini has a handle on divergent forms of humor that blend effortlessly in his screenwriting.
This fusion of old-hat and modernist comic sensibilities ultimately says something about the Joker and Dini’s particular skill as he strives to constantly reinvent the character. The contradictory modes of comedy function as an extension of the tonal contradictions of his previous Joker/Harley comedies, which satisfied both grim, psychological realism and screwball zaniness. Joker’s Millions, after boiling it down, is an adaptation of a Silver-Age Joker adventure in a series that typically plays him for ghoulish menace, yet another oxymoronic creative decision and the one that most aptly reflects Dini’s boldness in his decree that multiple versions and interpretations of the same character coexist in streamlined continuities. The Joker of Joker’s Millions conflicts with that of Mask of the Phantasm, but this illogical flexibility compensates by fostering an immensely satisfying range of unpredictable personas and dimensions of character that seeks to demolish our dogmatic precepts about serialized continuity.
Dini is a formidable artist working within the humble art of television screenwriting who feels free to mix and match seemingly incompatible genres and formats into wildly inventive wholes. This defiance of the established order is what has made him so hard for certain fans to accept as he inevitably veered away from straightforward melodrama (not that he has not successfully tried his hand at them since) and into more formally adventurous terrain.
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