Arthur Fleck's laughter in the film Joker (2019) was disturbing because it feels forced from him by a world that cannot contain or understand his pain (1). He confesses at one point, "I just don't want to feel so bad anymore," as if trying to explain an emotional burden no one can see much like so many of us who suffers from anxiety, depression, or with neurodivergent minds. From the outset, this involuntary laughter marks him as someone who does not fit the categories that doctors and social workers want to impose on him. He laughs at inappropriate times, in inappropriate places, and for reasons that he himself seems unable to articulate. Yet this inability to conform, to align his affect with socially approved emotions, is part of what makes his character resonate. It recalls what Michel Foucault diagnosed in the modern era: the ways in which power operates through careful observation, classification, and normalization (2). In Joker, the audience witnesses how easily an individual who cannot be disciplined into normality becomes an object of pity, confusion, and eventually, fear.
In a crowded bus, Arthur Fleck's laughter fills the cramped space, reverberating off the metal walls and blending with the ambient noise of the city.
The world Fleck plays in resembles a broken stage. By around the 7:50 mark in the film, he has already expressed his desperation and has been laughed at while trying to entertain a child on a bus (3). His involuntary laughter creates a bridge between tragedy and mockery. By the time his mother casually dismisses his dream of being a comedian ("Don't you have to be funny to be a comedian?"), the viewer sees how every attempt to craft a stable identity falls apart. The hospital scene at 29:00, where he inadvertently drops a gun, or Thomas Wayne's contempt for the struggling population at around the 39:00 mark, illustrate how oppressive social structures refuse him a coherent role (4). The environment is saturated with despair and humiliation.
The imposing structure of the panopticon loomed above, its circular design allowing a solitary guard to observe the prisoners within, their faces marked by a mix of resignation and defiance.
Foucault's Discipline and Punish describes the shift from overt violence to subtler, internalized mechanisms of discipline. In modern society, power functions like a panopticon, maintaining a state of conscious and permanent visibility (5). Social media and digital platforms now amplify this surveillance. Each piece of content: every video, post, meme - becomes an examination, a data point. The algorithm's unseen eye watches, classifies, and determines what is worthy of attention and what should be buried. Fleck's laughter, had it occurred in our current digital zeitgeist, might appear on someone's feed as an oddity for a moment before being categorized, tagged, and eventually monetized or discarded (6). This parallels the way all forms of resistance risk being converted into a commodity.
We see this dynamic today in online spaces, where absurd humor--especially among younger generations--resists clear interpretation. Consider the Dadaists in post-World War I Europe, artists who rejected the rationality and order that had failed so spectacularly (7). They produced nonsense poetry, collage, and performance art that refused to convey stable meaning. In their refusal to "make sense," the Dadaists exposed the absurdity of the larger system. Today's TikTok creators and meme-makers channel a similar logic (8). The nonsense they produce--jump cuts, random audio overlays, unpredictable juxtapositions--mirrors that earlier anti-rational impulse. By doing so, they create micro-spheres of resistance, moments that slip out of neat categorization. In these fleeting bursts, we find echoes of the Joker's laughter: a refusal of coherent narrative that cannot be easily harnessed for profit.
Shown here are a set of Dadaism images from Post War Germany/Weimar Republic that are aburdist features are similar to what short form videos produce today on Tiktok
But modern capitalism is agile. As soon as something appears truly resistant, it risks being integrated into the cycle of production, marketing, and consumption. This process is evident in what has come to be called the Hawk Tuah phenomenon (9). Hawk Tuah began as an online sensation, someone seemingly authentic and outside the polished norms of influencer culture. She built a brand that felt raw, even rebellious. Yet before long, she turned her sudden fame into a crypto scheme, "rugging" millions from her followers and then disappearing. The disappointment and rage that followed reveal a pattern: what starts as a break in the system's logic can quickly become a product to sell. Authenticity is commodified, marketed, and eventually exploited (10).
Commentators like emily.anne.g on Threads have noted that the Hawk Tuah brand became a form of merchandise--something that began as a voice of authenticity was reduced to products and endorsements (11). Once trust was established, the pivot to fraud was both shocking and strangely predictable. In an environment saturated with surveillance and exploitation, what people crave is something real. But this craving itself becomes valuable. Some have argued that we live in a cultural moment that is particularly permissive of scams, perhaps because so many feel desperate for quick relief in a precarious economy. Post-COVID inflation, rising costs of essentials, and general despair mirror historical conditions such as those in post-WWII Germany (12). In both cases, systemic breakdowns create fertile ground for scams and deception. If Fleck's laughter is the sound of a system failing to heal its wounded, then Hawk Tuah's scam is that same system's logic turned inward--an opportunistic strike that plays on collective vulnerability.
Inflationary data from 2016 to 2024
Foucault argued that power is not just repressive but productive. It creates norms, truths, and even objects of resistance. The Hawk Tuah phenomenon shows how the system can produce the conditions for its own critique and then reabsorb that critique for profit. When resistance becomes "trendy," it loses its capacity to unsettle. It is no longer a laughter that baffles and disturbs. It's a branded slogan on a T-shirt or a memecoin. As soon as people "get it," it ceases to threaten. This is why the Joker's final declaration : "You wouldn't get it", resonates. Once the system understands and categorizes a form of resistance, it can neutralize it.
TikTok's absurd content tries to avoid this fate. Users embrace incomprehensibility as a strategic maneuver. When everything serious and meaningful can be packaged and sold, the only way to resist might be to refuse meaning altogether. The more nonsensical the performance, the harder it is to monetize. Yet this is a delicate dance. Absurdity can be momentarily liberating, just as Fleck's laughter can momentarily unsettle. But the algorithm continuously learns. Absurdities become genres, genres become marketing niches, and soon we have companies selling "authentic chaos" as a brand. The cycle repeats, each time pushing content creators to find new forms of illegibility that resist interpretation.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault notes that "where there is power, there is resistance." Resistance is embedded in the networks of power themselves. This suggests that no matter how efficiently the algorithm tries to categorize us, some expressions will still exceed its grasp. Arthur Fleck's transformation into the Joker represents a trajectory from victim to an agent of chaos. By the film's end, he discovers that his life is not a tragedy but a comedy. This twist acknowledges that what truly unsettles the system is not a coherent, rational protest, but a form of defiance that defies understanding. Chaos eludes neat storylines.
Post war Germany inflationary data
This tension is historically grounded. Consider the legacy of artists like Otto Dix or Hannah Höch in the Weimar Republic. They produced unsettling and challenging works that reflected the trauma and fragmentation of post-war society. Their art resisted easy interpretation, revealing the cracks in the Enlightenment's faith in rationality and progress. Today's meme culture, shaped by the pressures of late capitalism, echoes this legacy. Just as Dadaists confronted a Europe devastated by war and disillusion, Gen Z and others grapple with ecological crises, wealth disparities, and endless streams of digital surveillance. The result is a culture that often responds with layers of irony, nonsense, and forms of expression that deliberately resist stable meaning.
The economic pressures that have recently fueled scams and frauds are part of a larger tapestry of discontent. After the COVID-19 pandemic, hyperinflation and corporate-driven price hikes have left many struggling. Instability, as in the Weimar era, makes people vulnerable to simplistic promises and short-term solutions. Scammers exploit this vulnerability. Hawk Tuah's crypto rug pull can be viewed as the dark mirror of the same forces that push some creators into nonsensical art: both are responses to a system that leaves individuals feeling powerless. One reaction is to exploit, the other is to evade classification through chaos.
FTC Data on investment scams in the last 3 years.
The Joker film reminds us that empathy and horror can coexist. At about 1:15:00 into the movie, we learn that Fleck's entire sense of love and support was a hallucination. Medication withdrawal leaves him with nothing but raw emotion. "I haven't been happy my entire fucking life," he confesses. He can produce laughter, but no conventional jokes. His humor is pure affect, stripped of the social contract that makes jokes intelligible to others. The laughter he offers is not a product, not a performance meant to please. It's an exhalation of psychic pain. In digital spaces, people sometimes produce similarly raw content: screams into the void, nonsensical rants that algorithmic logic cannot fully parse. These are not coherent critiques of neoliberalism, but desperate attempts to exist outside its grasp.
The Joker's chaos inspires imitators, but his final understanding that others "wouldn't get it" highlights how resistance is neutralized once it is understood. In a digital world where everything can be monitored and commodified, the challenge is to remain uncategorizable, to constantly shift and disrupt attempts at classification. Neither Fleck's unsettling laughter nor TikTok's absurd memes offer a coherent ideology; they defy easy interpretation and thus resist being neatly packaged as products. Even phenomena like Hawk Tuah's brief authenticity can be swiftly turned into scams, showing how easily subversion becomes merchandise. Yet by embracing confusion, nonsense, and the refusal to "make sense," we carve out small spaces of freedom, scrambling the signals the system relies upon. This strategy--living in the gap between understanding and confusion--lets us hold on to a form of human expression the system "wouldn't get."
References
Reference: Power/Knowledge, Quote
1a. In contrast to the great knowledge of the inquiry organized in the middle of the Middle Ages through the appropriation of the judicial system by the state—consisting in assembling the means to reactualize events through testimony—a new knowledge of a completely different type emerged. It is characterized by supervision and examination, organized around the norm, through the supervisory control of individuals throughout their existence. This examination was the basis of the power, the form of knowledge-power, that gave rise not to the great sciences of observation, but to what we call the "human sciences": psychiatry, psychology, sociology.
Source Essay
Ref. No., Source
Arthur Fleck's laughter in the film Joker (2019)
Cambridge BJPsych Bulletin - Analysing JokerFoucault diagnosed in the modern era
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the PrisonFleck being laughed at on the bus
Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Podcast - Joker AnalysisThomas Wayne's contempt for the struggling population
Clue Chronicles - Joker's Psychological TransformationPower functions like a panopticon
Foucault, Discipline and PunishFleck's laughter in our digital zeitgeist
Stanford Philosophy on Foucault and Benthan's PanopticonDadaists rejecting rationality
Art Now Thus - Gen Z and DadaismTikTok creators channel a similar logic
New Yorker - Dada Era of Internet MemesHawk Tuah phenomenon
BBC - Hawk Tuah Crypto FraudAuthenticity is commodified
Screen Rant - Mental Illness in JokerCommentators on Hawk Tuah's pivot
Emily Ann's Critique of Hawk TuahEconomic pressures post-COVID
AdventHealth - Joker's Mental Health Depiction
Recommended Books
Michel Foucault - Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Sianne Ngai - Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting
Hans Fallada - Alone in Berlin
Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil