A Joker by the People, for the People

Last Friday night at the IFC Center, a line snaked all the way to the Papaya Dog on the corner of West 4th Street, full of freaks and geeks bouncing with excitement for the 9:45 screening of comedian Vera Drew’s debut feature, The People’s Joker. The sold-out screening before it had gone a bit long; Jeremy O. Harris had stopped in to host a Q&A, and Drew had to preface it all with a legal spiel about fair use and copyright law. She has a comic’s instincts and feeds off the crowd’s energy, and what starts as legal boilerplate and “thank you for coming” can become a Joker-style stand-up set of her own. But fans had waited four years to see this unlikely superhero film. What was 15 more minutes? In the lobby, the theater had the energy of a pilgrimage, like when people talk along with Nicole Kidman’s AMC pre-roll (Kidman’s CGI likeness does make an appearance in this movie). More queues formed at the concession stand to buy souvenir shirts that read “I Watched the People’s Joker” in Cesar Romero–esque purple and green: “Now I’m Trans.”

Drew started her career in TV as an intern on The Eric André Show before working as an editor on Abso Lutely productions such as Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories, Comedy Bang! Bang!, and other series like Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? She began writing and directing on such projects as On Cinema and I Love David around the time she was coming out as trans publicly via a web series, which is where she first announced The People’s Joker in 2020. At first, Drew set out to remix Todd Phillips’s Joker as a stir-crazy lockdown goof and a spoof. But with the help of a small army of indie animators, effects artists, and musicians, it grew into an autobiographical trans saga of self-discovery — hilarious, radical, moving, and definitely not affiliated with the DCEU or Warner Bros. in any official capacity. It’s unlike any superhero movie ever made; where mainstream comic-book movies use green screens to a flattening effect, The People’s Joker uses them to create the feel of a trippy, living cartoon, with hand-sketched elements in the background and animated visual gags straight out of some art-house R-rated Roger Rabbit fever dream. All of it is held together by Drew’s performance as Joker the Harlequin, a troubled anti-comic figuring out how to express herself on a gender level and an artistic one while evading Batman, Lorne Michaels, and her mother.

After an early cut of the film caused a sensation and was eventually pulled from the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, there were fears among fans that Drew’s cri de jo-coeur would become the sort of cult film obtainable only through torrents, passed around in secret. Instead, indie distributor Altered Innocence picked it up, with the help of a legal team who are cheekily anonymous by choice in the film’s end credits, and ensured every step of the way that this work qualifies as “transformative” use of the character protected by law — the poster literally calls it a “fair use film.” Now, this landmark of queer cinema and the best Joker origin story ever told is finally with its People as it rolls out theatrically across the U.S. (It opens in Los Angeles today.) We caught up with Drew to talk Kevin Smith, uncut dicks, and why David Liebe Hart is her Obi-Wan Kenobi.

You say in the end credits that this all stemmed from your friend Venmo-ing you $12 to do a funny edit on Todd Phillips’s Joker. How did this grow from a bit into — 
… a joke that I took too far? It was the first artistic commission I ever got, and it was from my friend Bri LeRose, who was a writer on Lady Dynamite and Arrested Development. She’s one of the funniest people I know. She sent me that commission because Todd Phillips had been complaining about woke culture in the press, saying that he didn’t want to direct comedy anymore because it was just too hard with all these pronouns, or whatever these guys like to talk about. On some level, I understand it. We live in very reactionary times. I got called transphobic on Twitter the other day. Everybody’s emotional and upset. That’s why I made this movie. But he had just made a billion dollars making a comic-book movie that was a comedy, because Joker is a dark comedy.

Like many things in my life at that point, this was birthed on Twitter. Bri said, “I will only watch this guy’s movie if Vera Drew does her re-edit of it.” I’m autistic and don’t get sarcasm, so I took it very seriously. I was an editor at Abso Lutely for years and came up in postproduction and worked with Everything Is Terrible for a pretty long time, and most of my re-editing was just adding fart sound effects to footsteps and adding a kind of ’90s Scorsese soundtrack to it. But it was becoming more of a mixed-media project. The earliest idea that was more narrative than an experimental remix was, What if being a Joker was just a nine-to-five job? 

I had been processing a life spent making comedy, because I’ve been doing it since I was 13, and comedy was this beautiful place for me to express myself. When I performed, I only ever did stand-up in drag, and that was as a quote-unquote “straight man.” I was able to explore my femininity and my queer expression in a very safe way. I’ve also had the chance to work for every alternative comedy genius there is. I wrote and directed this web series with Tim and Eric called I Love David, and that was a show that I always considered very queer and very sincere, even though it’s not very explicitly so. It was the start of me processing both how comedy can help inform identity and help you understand yourself, but also take you down a dark path of exploitation and self-deprecation.

I was thinking about that a lot toward the end of 2019, when I had this idea for a film about a drag queen who was physically addicted to irony and literally irony poisoned in a body-horror way. When I was remixing Joker, I remembered that idea and these others I had swirling around, and it all clicked into place for me. My earliest memories are wanting to make films. I’ve wanted to be a filmmaker my entire life. During pre-vaxx 2020 COVID, it really was like, Is the world just fucking ending? I don’t know if I’m ever going to get this chance again. So what if instead of making this a remix movie, I take that drag-queen idea and inject it into this world and make it about comedy in general? So I went back to Bri and said, “You got me into this mess. I need you to help me write this, because I have a story I want to tell. It’s pretty sad and intense, and you’re a lot funnier than me, so please help me make it funny.”

Photo: Altered Innocence

The People’s Joker uses a visual language you’ve honed at Adult Swim, but deploys it in a way that gets at something emotionally much deeper. How did you find that tonal balance? 
I had been playing with these aesthetics forever, and I wanted to show them in a new context, using the same tools that I had used on Check It Out With Dr. Steve Brule, for example, to tell a very sincere story. When I was editing in TV, I’d always get notes like, “I don’t know what you did here. I’m confused about the tone of the scene. I don’t know if you’re being sincere, or if you’re making fun of what we wrote.” And I’d always say, “This is just what felt right for me. What if viewers can decide for themselves if it’s sincere or sweet or a shit post or ironic?” So I wanted to fully lean into breaking the rule that it can’t be funny and ironic and sincere and sweet and sad and scary all at the same time. I wanted to go out of my way to do that in every single frame of this movie.

The movie breaks other rules, too. One note that I would always get specifically from Sacha Baron Cohen when I was working on Who Is America was, “You’re doing too many jokes at once. It’s too confusing. People will turn it off. They’ll be overwhelmed.” On one level, Sacha made me a way better editor. I evolved from being that restrained. But going into this, I decided, I’m going to specifically break Sacha’s rule. I am going to load the frame with jokes. There’s gonna be so many fucking jokes that people aren’t going to be able to take most of them in on even two viewings, and I’m gonna make a character in the movie based on him. It was very much a conscious effort to use all of the tools and lessons that I’ve learned working with these guys for my evil, nefarious purposes.

It really is such a joke-dense movie. Do you have any gags you’re particularly proud of?
There’s an arc that I’m very proud of. The Riddler in this movie is played by Trevor Drinkwater, who I met because he had a Kevin Smith podcast. He got involved in the movie because he told me, “Listen, I’m obsessed with the Riddler in the way that you’re obsessed with the Joker. I need you to make me the Riddler.” In our first draft, the Riddler was just a background character. But when I had my second meeting with Trevor, he came back and said, “So I’ve written a whole backstory for this character. I’ve written scenes that happen in between my scenes that explain what’s happening to him.” So now there’s a whole arc that happens in the background of the movie that you don’t really get unless you really specifically look for it. That’s one of the things that I can’t wait for people to unpack.

I’m excited for people to find Easter eggs. There’s even stuff that I missed, because there are so many people who worked on this, and so many pieces of art that came in at like three in the morning, and I’d go, “Cool, I’m putting this in the movie, it’s done.” And then I’d watch it and be like, “Oh my God, the dick in the dick-scanning machine is uncut. That’s so funny!”

You mentioned this Kevin Smith podcast. Has he seen the movie yet? It seems right up his alley.
He hasn’t yet, but I really want him to, because I know he loves Batman, and gay stuff is very thematic in his work. I saw Clerks way too young, and illegally, which is kind of the way you should see Clerks. It was very inspirational. That was the first movie I ever saw where I thought, Okay, I can make movies. I’ve tried to get his attention a few times, but I think he’s seen some of my negative takes on some of his later work. I regret it at this point, because the times when I’ve talked negatively about his films, I was just being mean to my 15-year-old self. Yoga Hosers is a blast. Tusk is fun. So, Kevin, if you’re reading this, I am sorry and I would love to show you The People’s Joker, and I love you and thank you for making films.

Also, if anyone could understand and forgive how being a vocal fan sometimes includes criticism of the thing you love, it would be Kevin Smith.
One time, I tweeted something about him, and he retweeted it and was basically like, This hurts. So about a year ago I DM’d him and apologized for that, and I also explained where I was coming from, that inner-child perspective. Remember how everybody treated George Lucas when he made the prequels? It’s hard when you’re a sweaty little fangirl and you have a lot to say about a piece of media that has made you think a lot about things. It’s hard not to just unload my honest feelings about it. I’m hoping he can understand that.

Seeing the early reactions to our movie after TIFF is when this clicked into place for me. Everybody has mostly been in our corner, particularly the genre filmmaking community. But it’s hard to make something super-personal and hear people say, “This movie looks like shit” and “What the fuck is this?” and “This person’s a groomer” or whatever. So, in general, now with other people’s movies, if I don’t like something, I try not to talk about it.

On the note of fandom, can you talk more about what these characters mean to you? Because the Joker, especially, is used by a lot of people to represent a lot of things. He’s ubiquitous.
I think anybody can project their politics onto these characters, especially onto that Todd Phillips movie, because that movie did a good job showing where America was at that point in time. For me, it was crazy seeing this movie that was about class consciousness and the mental-health crisis, and here’s a character who’s mentally ill and doesn’t really know what that means. He just wants to be funny, and he’s trying to make that his life purpose, and his family system is failing him, his government is failing him, and then he gets turned into this politicized figure, and he’s like, “Why? I don’t get it. I’m not political.” I watched that as a trans person and was like, I relate to this so much. I feel left behind by my family structure and by the medical industry. Everything that he dealt with in that movie is very close to my experience as a trans woman, and trying to get access to support and care, and relating to being a comedy person that some people don’t understand, and wanting to carve out your own space. That really resonated with me. It speaks to the mythic status of Joker and Batman, that somebody with completely opposite politics than mine can watch that and have a whole other take on it. It could be about white disenfranchised males.

And as far as the Schumacher Batman of it all goes, my dad took me to see Batman Forever at 6 years old with my Uncle Chaz. We were in Baraboo, Wisconsin, at this tiny little theater, and it was a momentous occasion for me, because it was the first PG-13 movie I was ever allowed to see in a theater. Comedy and content were gate-kept in my house. I was not allowed to watch The Simpsons, but we watched Seinfeld all the fucking time as a family, which is crazy to me. Seinfeld definitely fucked me up way more than The Simpsons ever would have.

First and foremost, creatively, I had just never seen a live-action movie that was that colorful and vibrant and serious and operatic, but also silly and fun, and it was another one of those movies like Clerks or Back to the Future that informed an artistic vision at a very young age of the kind of stuff I’d want to make and the kind of aesthetics I wanted to play with. And then on a more gender-y level, watching that movie and seeing Nicole Kidman in it, and how Batman looks at her, and how she looks. I remember sitting there in the theater like, Why do I feel represented right now as a 6-year-old quote-unquote “boy”? I’m relating to Dr. Chase Meridian. 

So we ended up parodying that real-life event in the movie, and that was always the main thing that we focused on: What is my personal identification with these characters? The Joker has always been a very queer character in the comics. In Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum book, Joker is squeezing Batman’s ass, and he also has this weird inter-dimensional shaman vibe to him. All of that really resonates with me. The other day, somebody asked me why I felt comfortable giving Joker the Harlequin a Messiah arc when my movie is this personal. Like, “Do you think you’re the antichrist or something?” No, I don’t. I just think a lot of trans people do have a Messiah complex on some level when they’re coming into their trans-ness, because we literally die and then we’re reborn! There’s a lot of that within the Joker story, and within the Harley Quinn story.

Then, it was always about filling in those details of my life. I grew up in a small town in the Midwest, so Young Joker’s going to grow up in Smallville. I had a really shitty abusive ex, so why not make him Jared Leto’s Joker? That is one of my favorite Jokers of all time and really embodies that toxicity. I hope that because of how specific I am, and because of all the themes we’re circling, people can have the same experience with this piece of content where they’re like, “This is what my relationship with these characters is.” And I think a lot of the people who like the movie don’t really see comic-book movies most of the time, which is cool. But I see a lot of comic-book movies. I’m obsessed with Batman. Batman’s my favorite person.

The movie is largely a critique of comedy institutions like Upright Citizens Brigade and Saturday Night Live. In your version of Gotham, alternative comedy is outlawed, clowns have to go through a formulaic “United Clown Bureau” certification process, women can’t join the main-stage cast except as sexy Harlequins, and Lorne Michaels is a weird little CGI authoritarian voiced by Maria Bamford. What’s your relationship to these organizations?
I started doing comedy really, really young. I was an improviser and a sketch-comedy person when I was 13, and Second City launched this youth pilot program in the early 2000s. There’s drama fags, and I was an improv fag, and it was this beautiful safe haven for me. So it was very much just a part of my life for 20 years before I really started working professionally with Tim and Eric.

When I came to L.A., around 2011 or 2012, was when I actually stopped performing. The stand-up scene was horrible, and stand-up for me was just an excuse to wear a dress. Sketch comedy was that to a certain extent too — a space where I could play with my identity and hopefully understand myself. But the stand-up scene was very toxic. Everybody was just obsessed with Louis and that “raw honesty” and “telling it like it is” and “jerking off in front of people,” and I just did not fit in, because I was very gay and didn’t know it yet.

But in trying to return to performing, the only options that were available to me at the time out here were at UCB, and there’s a reason UCB is right across the street from the Scientology Celebrity Center. It is a tiered, very expensive class structure that people have to spend thousands of dollars to get into. Getting into a main-stage cast is this fucking carrot they dangle in front of you. I went through their training program a little bit, and I was just not fit for that world. So I moved on from it, and I needed to carve out my own space. And thankfully I met Nate Faustyn, who plays Penguin in the movie, when I was a part of this public-access station that my friends and I started called Highland Park TV. That’s really where Joker starting an illegal comedy theater in the movie comes from. We all were these misfit freaks who wanted to get stage time and perform and make cool art and needed to carve out our own little space.

I started doing comedy so young, right after the Will Ferrell era of Saturday Night Live, so of course I wanted to be on SNL as a kid. But over the course of my life, I saw what SNL actually is: an arm of our nuclear-industrial complex more than anything. It really does decide elections. It normalizes the worst politicians we have, and the worst people. The fact that Shane Gillis was allowed to host after getting fired from the show, regardless of whether or not you think what he said was offensive, is just stupid. It goes to show that the woke-culture thing, and the cancel-culture thing, is actually horseshit. I know a lot of trans people and queer people who have gotten canceled who don’t make stuff anymore, and they got canceled for a misunderstanding or getting involved in some stupid discourse online. But when it’s somebody who already has power and recognition in the industry, they can really milk it. It helps their career.

The other thing that bothers me about SNL and the way that certain other shows are made now is they’ll try to embody queer aesthetics, but they’ll do it in a way that is lulling very well-meaning, often neoliberal people into thinking, I’m supporting queer art by watching SNL or I’m supporting queer art by watching this movie made by straight people that is about gay things for some reason. It’s frustrating. When I came out as trans, I was up for gigs, and then those gigs went away the second people realized I was trans. It’s hard for women in general to break into comedy and get into positions of power in the entertainment industry, and it’s especially hard for trans women. At the same time, I’ve had the experience of having my trans-ness be used as this political tool for people. I got hired for a writers’ room to help with a reboot of a series that I loved growing up. It was midway through that job that I was looking around the room, going, Oh, I got hired because I’m trans. I got hired as a diversity point for these people. The amount of times I was reminded by my showrunner, who was a complete douchebag and a total hypocritical pervert, of how much of a “good cis person” and a “good liberal” he was, it was so blatant to me.

I haven’t actually talked about this yet, because it’s kind of buried, but I got onto a diversity cast when I was around 16, and I remember thinking, Why am I on this? I’m a white person from the suburbs. The teacher was Charna Halpern, who is one of the people who effectively invented improv with Del Close and started iO. She took me aside after a class and said, “You’re really going to go places. You’re like a young Andy Dick.” And I thought, Oh, I am here because they all think I’m gay. It’s funny how having a marginalized identity really can give you some social cachet to some degree, but only in this context of either: Let’s watch a queer person get dragged through the mud and canceled and called a groomer by Tim Pool or whatever or Let’s put them on this beautiful pedestal of rainbow capitalism. I fucking hate conversations about representation that are just about putting queer people on-camera. It’s so surface level, and it’s always written very straight.

But I do feel like it’s changing, especially in the genre-filmmaking space. I’ve met a lot of incredible trans and queer and POC filmmakers this past year, and it’s really restored my faith in making art. It’s not all L.A. — there are people all over the country, all over the world, who are making art that is honest and bold and true, and they just don’t get these opportunities and these platforms. I’m very thankful that I told my truth with this Batman and Joker iconography, because I think it’s what hopefully got it attention. At the same time, I was never ready for this level of visibility at this point in my career, but I’m so thankful for it, and I’m so grateful that this movie is resonating with so many people.

In The People’s Joker, David Liebe Hart, cult-favorite public-access personality, puppeteer, and recurring figure on Tim & Eric, plays Ra’s al Ghul, who in this world is a legendary comedian and Joker the Harlequin’s Morpheus-like mentor. Why did you create this role for him? 
I love David Liebe Hart. I made a show with him years ago called I Love David that was basically a David Liebe Hart bio series. We gave him a small budget and were like, “Let’s just make the show you want to make.” Every single creative choice that he suggested to me I tried to pull off in some way. That’s why the show is this tapestry of consciousness and weirdness. I had been familiar with his work from being a lifelong public-access fan, but then at Abso Lutely, he was just this guy who’d show up at our office, drink all our Coca-Colas, and draw pictures of us and sign them. He’s one of the most beautiful human beings I’ve ever met.

When we were making I Love David together, I had just started taking hormones, and in many ways, it was the most beautiful part of my transition because nobody knew I was transitioning; it was just for me at that point. David was one of the first people I came out to, because I was spending so much time with him. I spent an entire summer with him making that show, and postproduction lasted six months, which is crazy, and which I’m sure Tim and Eric did not like. He and I would have these long, esoteric conversations about consciousness, queerness, and making art. When we wrapped his show, I was driving him home that night, and he was wistfully looking out the window off into space and going, “It’s just so cool that you and I get to make weird stuff like this.” This guy is a pure artist. He’s a Christian Scientist, but his philosophy is very Eastern, and both he and I very much feel like we are very close together. Our bodies are antennas that are right next to each other on the web of infinite consciousness.

So he’s always been this kind of Yoda figure for me, both in comedy and in my gender. I also wanted to have him in this movie because of his status in alternative comedy. This movie is about how comedy can exploit people, and he is somebody who is always shoved into that conversation, which is kind of frustrating, even for him, because he’s a willing participant. There’s no bigger fan of Tim and Eric Awesome Show than David Liebe Hart. He’s a total ham. He still calls me every day about making shows and stuff. He wants to be making the art he’s making, and I wanted to give him a part in this that had dignity and agency and was the kind of part he would never get cast in, this Obi-Wan figure based on Sacha Baron Cohen, Tim Heidecker, and Marc Maron all rolled into one. It’s the role of a lifetime, and I’m so proud of him. I could talk about him for a million years.