Behave Like a Fool, Think Like a Brilliant
As readers of this blog are all too aware, I am a man of many obsessions. One of my more unfortunate recent fixations is on memes juxtaposing images of iconic Batman villain Joker with pithy aphorisms ostensibly articulating the Clown Prince of Crime’s hard-won, no-bullshit philosophy.
I don’t want to brag but I belong to multiple groups dedicated to sharing motivational quotes involving primarily Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix’s take on the character, although Jared Leto and Jack Nicholson manage to make it into the mix every once in a while.
There are many things I find morbidly fascinating about this weird world. I’m gobsmacked, for example, that Joker has been a huge part of our culture for a very long time, in seemingly countless variations, yet as far as I know, he has NEVER said any of the things vaguely attributed to him in the many motivational memes bearing his image.
Not only did no version of the Joker say any of the things found on Joker motivational meme pages; it’s damn near impossible to imagine him dispensing many of the witticisms found on these fascinating pages.
In that respect they’re a little like those tedious celebrity parody accounts that used to be ubiquitous on Twitter. The very shaky idea behind these cynical attempts to piggy-back on the public’s love for people like Bill Murray or George Carlin was that these accounts didn’t necessarily post things Murray or Carlin did say but rather things they might have said, or memes or jokes that fit their personas.
I could be wrong but I don’t recall any incarnation of the Joker encouraging people to follow their dreams and not let obstacles stop them unless that dream involves helping him kill Batman.
I’m also fascinated by the shockingly large amount of non-Joker themed content on these pages. Despite famously playing a Batman villain in Batman Begins, Cillian Murphy is ubiquitous on these pages for his role in Peaky Blinders rather than his turn as Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan’s superhero smash.
You also see a fair number of lions and other fearsome big cats on these pages in the form of badass lion-man hybrids and ass-kicking tiger dudes from macho meme-makers who take the concept of going into beast mode and being savage literally.
But my very favorite off-brand Joker meme, and one that gives me WAY too much joy juxtaposes an image of Rowan Atkinson looking very silly as Mr. Bean with a picture of him looking very serious and intelligent accompanied by the words, “Behave Like a Fool, Think Like a Brilliant.”
I know what the meme is supposed to mean. If the meme was “Act like a fool, think like a genius” or “Act foolishly, think brilliantly” it would be painfully banal but at least it would make sense and not represent a weird self-own from the anonymous but much appreciated meme-maker who brought this transcendent bit of online idiocy in the world.
I very much suspect that the meme-maker who introduced this glorious phrase into the cultural vernacular was not a native English speaker.
That’s true of many of the memes shared on these pages as well. The tenses are off, words are missing and the context seems all wrong.
Indeed, the very idea of Joker as a motivational figure doling out bite-sized wisdom and pithy aphorisms feels like something that got hopelessly lost in translation between American English and the non-English-speaking world.
In the United States, Joker has a very specific cultural context that he seems to have transcended internationally somewhere along the way. He’s bigger than Batman now, bigger than comic books, bigger than even billion-dollar Oscar-winning movies, bigger even than the country that birthed him. He’s also somehow even bigger than Joker motivational memes.
Joker motivational memes similarly transcended their connection to Joker a while ago so I am going to honor not only my guru Joker but also his acolyte Mr. Bean by behaving like a fool but thinking like a brilliant.
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