“Ridiculing The Tragic: The Disillusioned Comedy of Life In Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019)”

The perception of comedy is multifaceted, with various aspects influencing its comprehension. Through this study, I will examine how Todd Phillips exposed a counterintuitive type of comedy in his Joker (2019) by exposing the dark side of existence and how the notion of comedy is relatively signified based on different living conditions. The film divulges the equivocal significance of comedy that proceeds to fuse humor with tragedy. On the one hand, comedy in the film has the structural organism of what humor theoretically ought to comprise such as amusement and laughter, yet, on the other hand, it exposes negative sentiments and reactions towards, at their core, “Arthur’s jokes.” In pursuance of conceptualizing the humor operated in Joker (2019), my analysis is based on Kant’s contribution to the incongruity theory, which approaches humor that arises from ludicrous situations and ties its comprehension to our perception of jokes and reality. Laughter, in accordance with the incongruity theory, happens when a temporary loss of concentration causes us to notice the situation’s inherent ridiculousness or incongruity. The insanity and irrationality of Arthur’s actions and decisions in the film create a series of ludicrous situations. To explain this, the analysis will be reinforced by Aristotle’s conceptions of comedy and tragedy in order to determine how the two concepts are interrelated. As a result, we see comedy and jokes depicted in a way that is meant to make us realize the relative importance of ideas and feel disillusioned.