Joker: Folie à Deux’, with its fiery mix of song and dance, hit the cinemas recently and rekindled memories of how Batman and the Joker’s legendary feud began. It starts in the story ‘Batman: The Winning Card’ where, unable to understand the Joker’s sense of humour, Batman tells his nemesis a joke. It is about when Batman asks a mechanic to check his Batmobile’s malfunctioning battery and the mechanic replies, ‘I give up, what the hell’s a tery?’ While Batman laughs at his own joke, the Joker doesn’t find it funny, and a livid Batman knocks him down.

While I don’t quite see standup comedian Kunal Kamra and Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal being offered the roles of the Joker and Batman in a sequel, their story follows similar twists, including the commonality of defective batteries.

Recently, the comedian pointed out service quality issues with a picture of dozens of electric scooters languishing outside what seemed like an Ola service centre. Ola’s CEO responded abrasively with, ‘Come and help us out. I’ll even pay more than you earned for this paid tweet or from your failed comedy career.’

A Twitter war began, but when you pit a businessman against a man in the business of words, there can only be one winner. It didn’t help that the spat led to resurfacing of reports of Ola’s apparently exploding batteries and a disgruntled customer setting fire to a showroom over unresolved complaints.

Hubris, especially in the world of transportation, is like excess baggage; there is always a price to be paid. Plenty of airline CEOs can tell you how they went from first class to offloading their airlines because of their own arrogance. It didn’t spare the mythological Phaethon, either, who insisted that he would drive the sun god’s chariot through the heavens. Unable to control the horses, Phaethon drove too close to the earth and was struck down by a lightning bolt by Zeus.

Once upon a time, it was the gods that struck people down. These days, it’s more likely to be the stock market. Aggarwal probably wasn’t expecting Kamra’s scooter comments and their exchange of irate tweets to send his shares skidding the following day, but he ended up losing a lot more than just his temper.

In a pack of cards or in life, the joker holds all the aces. Based on the trickster archetype in storytelling, the joker is meant to disrupt the system and challenge norms. Even in the movie business, Batman has never won an Oscar, while the Joker, played by Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix, won two.

While philosophers garner great respect, we fail to consider that jesters also distil the essence of life. They just have a greater need to be entertaining, unlike their droning philosophical counterparts.
Modern theorists tend to split jokes into three main categories. There is the Superiority Theory, where laughter is found at the expense of another’s misfortunes. This is perhaps why people enjoyed memes with ‘Akhiyon se goli maare’ when one of my favourite comedians, Govinda, accidentally shot himself in the leg.

Then there is the Incongruity Theory, where the unexpected defies our expectations, like in this joke: ‘They say marriage is not a bed of roses, which is a bit of a relief; otherwise, you would be constantly pricked as you lay there, rather than just twice a week and when the kids are fast asleep.’ I initially wrote it to promote a rose-scented lotion. Of course, it was rejected, and finally made its way to an advice column.

We also have the Relief Theory, which explains why, at funerals, you see people cracking jokes with a dead body three feet away. In the pressure cooker of tragedy, humour acts as a valve releasing heated emotions as bursts of cackling laughter.

Zelensky, the former comedian turned Ukrainian president who, I believe, is almost Batman and the Joker rolled into one, also uses his sense of humour to deal with grim situations. He has jokes about Vladimir Putin, he says, and in a press conference, stated, ‘You will laugh, but in Russia, they will cry. I’m not sure if this is appropriate. This is called black humour.’

In ‘The Winning Card’, Batman eventually visits the Joker in Arkham Asylum. Our caped crusader suggests that the Joker didn’t understand his ‘battery’ joke. The Joker replies, ‘It’s just not funny.’ He has spent time dissecting Batman’s joke and believes that a mechanic would obviously know what a battery is, which destroys the entire premise. A joke falls flat if it doesn’t reflect reality.
As black as coffee or as dry as a chardonnay, a good joke wakes you up from your stupor because the jokers who create them use their sharp tongues to slice through the truth. This is why the joker wins — sometimes an Oscar, sometimes a Twitter battle.

Perhaps as important as making others laugh, the ability to laugh at yourself is an invaluable asset. Devoid of a sense of humour, you have to take other people, and even worse, yourself, very seriously, which will eventually drive you up the wall, with or without the aid of an electric scooter.

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