Taking the comics and comedy universe hostage with The People’s Joker, Vera Drew

Wait ’til they get a load of her.

Vera Drew, the co-writer, director, and star of the Joker parody The People’s Joker, has ridden the Batwing to national prominence as only the creator of such an absurd work could. Produced on a dare, or, as she tells it, a $12 Venmo request to re-edit Todd Phillips’ Joker, Drew’s film spiraled from there, becoming, at one point, a re-edit of the entire Batman cinematic canon before settling into its final form: a crowdfunded, mixed-media transgender coming-of-age comedy parodying Joker, Batman, and the comedy world at large. However, on the eve of its 2022 premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, an unnamed media conglomerate sent an angry letter to Drew, “pressuring” her not to screen the film, fitting for a movie set in a world where comedy is illegal.

Following a months-long back-and-forth with her legal team, The People’s Joker is finally free. The film is exactly what it says it is and so much more. Though it contains the bones, structure, and iconography of Todd Phillips’ improbable billion-dollar grosser, People’s Joker is very much Drew’s story. She plays “Joker the Harlequin” in a Gotham City where Batman owns a streaming service, comedy is only available to those with the right training, and every aspiring comedian is a Joker—unless they’re a girl, then they’re a Harlequin. Having worked under luminaries from the alt- and mainstream comedy world, such as Tim Heidecker, Eric Andre, and Sacha Baron Cohen, Drew maps her professional journey onto Joker. It’s what makes People’s Joker so thematically winning: Her ultimate Jokerification comes from her desire to be a professional clown.

Vera Drew spoke with The A.V. Club about her relationship with comedy, Joel Schumacher, and, yes, the Caped Crusader, wondering, when it comes to the hostile response to her singular parody, why so serious?

Vera Drew: My favorite soap opera.

AVC: Which season did you direct?

VD: Season 12. It was the season with all the “Heilots.” You know, Bill Maher ripped off my set.

AVC: For Club Random?

VD: [laughs] Yeah, it was that season.

AVC: The sets change with Tim’s hair on that show, especially now that they moved out of the movie theater. What reference points do you use?

VD: I can really only speak to that season because that was the only one I directed, but I think our main reference point was The Daily Wire. There were a lot of podcasts with men all sitting around talking and drinking scotch and smoking cigars in what looked like a sort of man cave. We definitely took that, and we wanted to make it a little bit more movie-centric. I was definitely the one that was like, “And there needs to be, like, bisexual lighting to it.” I thought that was going to be the thing that would make it a parody—making it look like a Virgin Megastore or like a Schumacher movie. But then Club Random came out, and it’s just exactly the same set. It’s the same lighting scheme.

There’s something about On Cinema. It’s like a giant chaos magic ritual. Every time they make something, it’s like ripping a hole open in the universe, and then reality shape-shifts into what we were parodying. It only happens with that show. I have worked on a lot of cool stuff, but there’s some sort of magic that On Cinema really taps into.

AVC: Was season 12 the season where Toni Newman gives that great monologue?

VD: Terry [Parks], who plays Toni, really crushed it.

AVC: I couldn’t help but think of her monologue when I was watching People’s Joker. Lynn Downey gives an incredible performance as your mother in the film. All of a sudden, you’re hit with a lot of emotion and empathy for her. How do you balance the chaos of your movie with this hard, grounded emotion?

VD: The Toni Newman monologue in On Cinema—it’s the fact that I got to work with material like that that allowed me to do those kinds of tonal shifts in The People’s Joker. The things I’ve gotten to make with Abso Lutely, Tim and Eric, and Adult Swim, it’s always best when there’s like zany shit happening—people drinking poo or getting addicted to drugs and vitamins or vapes—but the emotion is grounded. That’s the thing that has always worked. Anything Heidecker is attached to always comes from a place of grounded emotion.

I learned a lot from him as a writer. As you can tell from my movie, I’m quite silly. My sense of humor is very maximalist and insane. He was always very encouraging of me to restrain myself and lean into “What is the true feeling we’re having here?”

We did it on Beef House, too. I directed, wrote, and produced on Tim And Eric’s Beef House. It was another show where I got to have the experience of one scene, we’re blasting Tennessee Luke with a stream of diarrhea out of a hose, and the next is Eric Wareheim and his wife, played by Meadow Soprano [Jamie-Lynn Sigler], going through a really grounded, realistic divorce.

With The People’s Joker, I wanted to do the pure heroin version of that, where in every single scene, you don’t know if you’re going to be watching a cop comically kill himself or a heart-wrenching scene between two queer people falling in love or Joker and her mom. It was one of the scary things about writing the script with Bri [LeRose]. There were so many times where we were like, “Can we do that? Can we have this?”, particularly Mr. J’s monologue in the middle of the movie. I don’t want to spoil too much about it, but we find out this character’s a former Robin to Batman, and it’s a very ridiculous premise that we play completely straight. It’s devastating. I cry watching the scene. Not to pat myself on the back, but that was one of the artistic guiding lights of the project: It’s a comedy movie, but it’s also a drama and a love story.

AVC: This has to be the first Batman movie ever dedicated to Joel Schumacher. What do you think about his Batman movies, their impact on you, and the cultural reevaluation we’re having with them right now?

VD: I’m so thankful that pop culture has finally caught up to me in recognizing the genius that is Joel Schumacher. I never understood the criticism of those Batman movies. I think people hated those movies because they were really expensive gay movies. They were big, beautiful—I mean, it’s crazy because they’re about straight people. Like, Batman isn’t gay in those movies, but he’s pretty gay in both Batman And Robin and Batman Forever.

I loved them as a kid because they felt like the comic books I was reading. They were colorful and fun. I actually love Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, but this mode of “we need to make grounded, realistic versions of these characters”? It’s a fucking movie about a billionaire who dresses up like a bat and beats up a guy who’s like a gay clown. You’re telling me we need to take this seriously?

My earliest memory is wanting to make movies. I knew I was a filmmaker before I knew I was a girl, and one of the first movies that really clicked into place for me was Batman Forever. My dad took me to see it. I was six years old. It was the first time I was ever allowed to see a PG-13 movie in a theater. It blew my mind. It felt like a comic book, but it also had humor in it, and there was romance. I had never seen a movie that gave you the whole dinner like that. I didn’t know you could do that with movies. I thought you could only make a comedy or The Jungle Book. But Batman Forever was the first time I was like, what the fuck? Like, this lighting is weird. That’s not what life looks like. You can actually just make a big, weird, cool, colorful thing.

Then, on the trans identity level, Nicole Kidman’s character in that movie—Dr. Chase Meridian, a psychologist who’s obsessed with bats—was an early lighthouse for me. There are two date scenes with her and Batman, and watching them as a kid, I had the experience of a sexual awakening. I’m sure those scenes were a sexual awakening for a lot of young men, but I really watched it in this way that I was like, “Oh, I feel represented right now by Nicole Kidman. I want to look like that. I want somebody to look at me the way Batman’s looking at her. I want to be waiting in bed for Batman to come in my nightie.” Having that experience as a six-year-old boy, watching this movie, we ended up parodying that in The People’s Joker.

AVC: You reframe the Batman origin story with People’s Joker. Instead of seeing Zorro—

VD: It’s definitely playing on the fact that Bruce Wayne became Batman because he went and saw Zorro. My version of the Joker became what she is because she went and saw this piece of propaganda. That’s the thing that makes Joker realize who she is. That’s what the movie is about in a broader sense. Conversations around representation are often very trite and annoying, but it goes without saying that I and many generations of trans people grew up in an era where we didn’t see our identity in films, certainly not in a comic book film, but we could still find it. I could watch a Joel Schumacher Batman movie and have that be something that informs my identity as a queer person, even though there are no trans-identifying characters in that film.

AVC: What distinguishes the Joker from any of the other millions of Batman characters? Why is Joker your focus?

VD: The fact that Joker and Batman are really in a toxic relationship together. They need each other to function. Batman is this vigilante agent of order, and Joker is this cosmic vigilante agent of chaos. They are essentially in a gay romance, as far as I’m concerned. [Laughs] I’ve been in toxic queer romances that look a lot like Batman and Joker.

And I really love Grant Morrison, just in general. The Invisibles is probably my favorite graphic novel of all time. How Grant writes Batman is so cool to me. Their book Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On A Serious Earth was a huge influence not just on The People’s Joker but me personally. It feels both like a Batman comic book and like you stumbled into a weird Masonic library and found a Necronomicon. It’s so esoteric and weird and, like, Joker is very gay in that book. Like he’s squeezing Batman’s ass—and, to some extent, Frank Miller did that [in Dark Knight Returns] with his Joker, which is essentially David Bowie. We’ve never seen the cinematic portrayal of Joker as a queer folk hero. We’ve seen it plenty in books.

Speaking to the parody, fair use criticism, and commentary of it all, we’ve never seen this character in that light before in a cinematic space. So let’s do it, and let’s do it within the bounds of parody law and fair use.

There’s another aspect to Grant’s Joker that really inspired the movie, which is this idea of “super sanity,” the idea that Joker is so crazy that he’s actually smart and can pierce through reality. Joker in that book knows he’s in a comic book because he’s so fucking crazy that he can he can see through the Matrix code. That resonates with me as a PTSD survivor because I really do feel like having PTSD, having a mental illness, has made me attuned to reality in this kind of cosmic, spiritual way, where I am hyper-aware. If I really try to, I can also look through the Matrix code. That’s also what the trans experience is, in and of itself, taking all the archetypes and shattering them and rebuilding them so that you can figure out who you are.

AVC: I wasn’t expecting People’s Joker to also be a really good Joker story. It parodies the Joker mythos in a surprising way, where there are many Jokers and each Joker acts differently and has a different philosophy. You gave Joker specificity as opposed to Todd Phillips’ Joker, which is a vague “any answer’s the right answer” perspective. Joker becomes Joker because, for so long, they weren’t allowed to be themselves is a powerful way to look at that character. Were you concerned about adding that level of specificity to the character? Because it does change the mystique.

VD: That is the reason that I made the movie and that I can make this movie. I watched Todd Phillips’ Joker, and I watched as a trans woman who related to a story about a person who can’t get the medical care he needs, who is impoverished because he really only knows how to be creative, and who has this pretty toxic, codependent relationship with his mom. Those were three big things for me that resonated with me as a trans woman and as a part of my trans experience. I think that is the power of that movie. I could watch that and have that experience, and then somebody with the worst political views in the world could watch it and think it’s about disaffected white men. And then they’ll log on to YouTube and talk shit about my movie. [Laughs] That’s how our movie functions. It’s a commentary on those ideas that are put forward not just in [Phillips’] film but in all of the DC canon with Joker, looking at it through this very specific lens, a lens that only I could look through.

I can’t stress enough: This is not a Batman fan film. It is also a parody in the same way that Scary Movie is a parody or Naked Gun is a parody. I am legally allowed to do it because it is a commentary on Todd Phillips’ Joker, and it is my perspective on it. It’s a hard movie for me to watch because it’s really like watching my trauma on celluloid sometimes.

AVC: Regarding the film’s legality, there was almost a collective surprise that something like this could be made under parody laws. Robot Chicken has been on for 20 years, and it is just as offensive, if not more so, than anything in People’s Joker. Have we become too comfortable allowing corporations to parody themselves?

VD: I just think nobody’s ever done it the way I did it. There’s no precedent for what The People’s Joker is. There’s not one parody piece of media that people can point to and go, “Oh, it’s like that.” I think that’s really scary for people sometimes. But to me, that’s what’s exciting. Here’s a movie that you’ve never seen before. It’s playing with things you’ve seen a billion times, but it’s showing it to you in a way that you’ve never seen before.

Warner Bros. wouldn’t make a trans Joker parody. That’s maybe some of the apprehension. In general, I think people are comforted by corporations in America. We are all kind of in a space where we feel like orphans or something. So I understand why people would be in a position where they don’t get it, or they don’t particularly like what they’re seeing.

This was always going to be my first movie, and I’m so thankful that it is because I could never have imagined I would get to make something that would have this level of exposure at this point in my career and that would simultaneously get people so excited and then get a handful of other people, like, pretty up in arms and, and weird about it.

AVC: There are so many unsung heroes of the Batman mythos in your movie, like Bob The Goon and Mr. Mxyzptlk. Was it satisfying to dig some of these characters up and write jokes about them?

VD: I just love Batman so much. I can’t stress that enough. I still see every single Batman movie that comes out and probably always will. But there are so many characters from that universe and aspects of that universe like “Super Sanity” or, you know, seeing the Red Hood mythos talked about in a way that’s more generalized and not just like, Joker used to be Red Hood.” Talking about it in a way that’s more mythic and stuff. It’s satisfying when I see people talk shit because I’m like, “Yeah, they haven’t seen it.” But if they’re Batman fans, I’m like, “This movie’s for you, dude! You should see it!” If you really actually love the comics, there are going to be things in this that you really like, latch on to, and are stoked that somebody else gives a shit about it enough to do a parody version of it.

Because I’m trans, my identity is immediately politicized, and it’s immediately politicized either in a neo-liberal, “Oh, they’re shoving the agenda down our throats way” or “Oh, she’s like one of those dirtbag leftist anarchist types.” I’m definitely not a moderate, but I don’t think the movie embodies either of those ideologies completely. Mr. J’s character is very heavily based on dirtbag left boys. He’s a gun-toting, leftist anarchist. I don’t want to say it’s critical of that, but it’s certainly not saying, “Hey, this is what everybody should be.”

The movie takes place in a universe where comedy is illegal, and that’s what I hear conservatives say all the time. So they should agree with the premise that I’m putting forward and see it from the perspective of “Yeah, comedy is heavily regulated and managed, and it’s not by people like me.” I’ve worked on every fucking cool alternative comedy television show for a decade. My first job was on season one of The Eric Andre Show, and it was hard for me to break out as a director and as a producer in that world after a decade of experience in it. I’m not saying it needs to be easier for girls or queer people to get into comedy, but I am trying to show the thing these edgelord, alt-right people are reacting to about woke culture and free speech, and I’m kind of with them. We live in a very reactionary time where people moralize everything. Media literacy is at an all-time low because we moralize every single thing that comes out. I also don’t think I am part of the elite just because I’m a transsexual. I think, if anything, I’m a villain. You know, I didn’t start an illegal comedy theater, but I really cut my teeth making my art, my personal art, at a public access station that I helped start a few years ago called Highland Park TV. That was my Red Hood theater, and I did that because comedy’s very inaccessible to, quote-unquote, marginalized identities.

AVC: There is an ominousness to the moment when Joker the Harlequin calls her boyfriend “Mr. J” for the first time. Obviously, Harley Quinn’s relationship with Joker is all kinds of fucked up. But what was it about the nicknames that you have such power? Why did you want to hit that?

VD: When you hear her call him that, you know exactly what their relationship is about to become. I fucking love that Birds Of Prey movie is a movie about moving on from that dynamic. And I really wanted to make something that was about that dynamic, but in a way that was honest.

The Mr. J character is based on a relationship that I had that was very traumatic, very intense, and abusive. But I wanted to make it a lot more nuanced because I really do think those kinds of codependent dynamics in queer relationships, they’re very identity-forming. I wanted to take that archetype of a toxic clown couple but talk about it in a way that was honest and hopeful and still real and grounded. I also didn’t want to make Mr. J an outright villain. He’s the only transmasculine character in the lead cast, I wanted him to have a softness while still really leaning into those archetypes.

AVC: In People’s Joker, Joker’s “Jokerfication” results from her struggle to become a comedian. She takes aim at comedy institutions that are integral to the entertainment pipeline, such as the UCB Theatre and Saturday Night Live. Did you or your cast have any concerns about that? Some of the cast, like Bob Odenkirk, came out of those places.

VD: I was concerned about involving people in it. I can’t stress enough: The views expressed about comedy in The People’s Joker are very much mine, and Bri LeRose’s to a certain extent, but I would even take more ownership of how angry it is at comedy. I grew up watching SNL. I wanted to be on SNL when I was a kid. If Lorne Michaels had come to any of my shitty improv shows when I was in my 20s and plucked me out of obscurity, I would have gladly taken his minimum-wage TV job. But at the same time, I wanted to tell an honest story about it.

UCB is like Scientology to some extent. I don’t know what it’s like now. I haven’t been there in years and please print that part of it because I know it’s rebranding now. I can’t speak to what it’s like now, but when I was there, it very much was gatekept. You had to pay thousands of dollars in classes to even get on a mainstage show, which is insane. When I got to UCB, I had already been doing comedy for years. I had been doing comedy since I was 13—just the most annoying 13-year-old on the planet, if you can imagine. I needed to make a big piece of art that not only criticized it but also talked about the good things about it.

In the movie, Lorne Michaels is played by Maria Bamford, who is probably my favorite comedian of all time, a national treasure. I love Maria, and I can’t believe she wanted to do the movie because she’s been around for a while. She cut her teeth in a lot of these scenes. She knows the shit that we face when we go into this world. Maria is one of the coolest, weirdest people making comedy. So, of course, she faced adversity.

She had one note. There’s a line in the movie where Lorne Michaels is convincing Joker the Harlequin to host the show that week. And Lorne starts spiraling, as I assume the real Lorne Michaels does, and starts rambling and saying, “Our writers on this show are so good, and I have no idea why the show is so bad.” It’s true too. I have friends who work on SNL. There are so many talented people who have come out of there and work there. But [Maria] saw the line, and she was like, “Listen, I don’t want to say the show is bad. Can I say that the show is uneven because that’s how I actually feel about it?” That’s a better version of the line, too, and it’s actually more true to how I feel about it.

I’m doing a lot of the stuff in this movie that SNL does every week. They always show characters who are intellectual properties that they don’t own in a parody context, so I’m clearly inspired by SNL despite thinking it’s part of our nuclear industrial complex.

AVC: How did Ra’s al Ghul become the improv guru at the comedy school, and why that character specifically?

VD: I love Ra’s al Ghul as a character in general. The idea that Batman studied not only martial arts but also mystical arts is one of the dumb, funny, fun, and cool things that I love about the Batman canon, so I wanted to do a parody version of that. Our version of Ra’s al Ghul did train Batman. Later in the movie, we find out that he was Batman’s comedy teacher, which might explain why Batman is upset about a few things in the movie. Also, I needed an Obi-Wan Kenobi-type figure in the film, and Ra’s al Ghul was the perfect archetype for that.

The perfect person to play that part was David Liebe Hart because this movie is talking about alternative comedy in a way that people have talked about David. It’s like, “Oh, is it okay to put this guy on TV? He’s so strange.”

I want to set the record straight: David Liebe Hart is the biggest Tim and Eric fan I’ve ever met and is obsessed with making comedy. He is a natural-born star. I worked with him on a show called I Love David that I wrote and directed with him. It’s about his life, and in the make the process of making that show, I had so many amazing conversations with him about art and spirituality and queer identity. He did become this Yoda-like figure in my life at various times.

But Ra’s al Ghul character was more based on my relationship with Tim Heidecker and when I worked with Sacha Baron Cohen. I worked with a lot of really cool, amazing comedy geniuses, and I’ve learned a lot from them. I wanted to talk about it in a way that was not only aggrandizing but also portraying them in an honest way. There’s a point in the movie where Joker the Harlequin has reached the end of her training, and—without spoiling it—Ra’s al Ghul is like, “I can’t encourage you to break the law, so I’m not encouraging you to do that. That is a decision you need to make for yourself.” There’s something about that that connects to my relationship with a lot of these comedy figures that I’ve gotten to work with. Tim’s the perfect example of this. He doesn’t always get what I’m doing but always hears it out. He’s always encouraging when it’s my own thing. With this movie, he’s he was like, “Look, I don’t know what the fuck you’re thinking making this, like, I don’t see it, but I’m proud of you and go for it.” That was something I really wanted to embody in this teacher character.

AVC: Ra’s al Ghul is not a perfect character. He works for the UCB and hangs out with Lorne Michaels. I imagine that is also true of your experience because, as we were talking about with regard to Maria Bamford, people you work with have connections to the wider comedy world.

VD: I think Sacha is in that character a lot too. He’d hate that. He’d probably hate that I said that. But Ra’s al Ghul in the movie is processing the experience of working on Who Is America with Sacha. Sacha’s a genius. I loved working with him. I looked up to him my entire life as a comedic performer, just one of the greats. And he also has a lot of rules about how you make stuff. One of his biggest rules was you can’t have two jokes happening at once. You can only do one joke at a time because that’s all that people can take in. And it would drive me nuts because that’s very much not my thing, as you can tell from my movie. I wanted to go out of my way in this film to break that rule but also talk about that idea in an honest way because I was the lead editor on Who Is America? They hired me to make Sacha Baron Cohen’s vision, so his notes, his concerns, and his rules about comedy and storytelling are coming from his experience of being a millionaire comedian who’s making his comeback as these Borat-type characters. My concerns as a stinky artist, little pop punk, trans girl are very different from that of an established comedic icon, who, yeah, still maybe embodies punk aesthetics but has a few more people they need to answer to now.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.