For Drew, a New York-based trans comedienne who works as an editor for alt-comedy shows like “I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson” and “Tim and Eric,” “The People’s Joker” is less a down-the-barrel takedown of the world of the Caped Crusader than it is a Bat-filtered lens through which she channels her life story as a trans woman and underground comic artist. Like any good supervillain, Joker the Harlequin (Drew) has a traumatic origin story of her own: A sheltered Midwestern childhood, an absent father, a judgy, emotionally unavailable mother (Lynn Downey), the creeping specter of gender dysphoria. The only comforts she can find are in Batman comics, in watching Nicole Kidman play with Val Kilmer’s rubber nipples in “Batman Forever,” and in the clownish antics of an “SNL”-like sketch show called “UCB.” “As far back as I could remember,” she narrates, “I always wanted to be a Joker.”
Finally saving up enough to leave home, Drew packs up and moves to Gotham City to audition for UCB. But when she’s drummed out on Day One, she finds new family with fellow comedy dropout Penguin (Nathan Faustyn), and together they start an “anti-comedy” venue with the rest of the city’s villains. Along the way, she discovers her nascent transness—her own Jokerfication, if you will—thanks to a relentless schedule of sketch-comedy burnout and a prototypically toxic relationship with a fellow Joker (a Jared Leto transmasc type played by Kane Distler).
It’s a garish, anarchic gumbo that works because of, not despite, its messiness. Drew whirls us from one scene to another with all the fragmented logic you’d expect from the Clown Prince of Crime. Except this time, she’s the Clown Princess of Comedy, and the Batman trappings feel like a familiar, loving blanket with which she explores her frustrations with (and community found in) the comedy world. There’s the incestuous nature of NY comedy social climbing, the pricey comedy classes, the bleakness of its dating scene (one of Joker’s eventual rules of love she imparts on us: “Don’t date comedians. Ever.”) But it’s all dressed up in a fan-pleasing mélange of references from Batman stories across a number of mediums and eras—the ‘60s show’s whirling scene transitions, “Batman Begins”’ ice-sheet swordfight as Comedy 101 training, even “Joker”s revelatory stairway dance.