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Lisa Gonzalez
Sydney Brown
English 120 / MW 11
18 October 2011
Daniel Moseley’s “The Joker’s Comedy of Existence”: Short Writing Assignment
Fairytales have always represented the moral battle between good and evil, and
the same could be said of comic books or graphic novels. In Daniel Moseley’s essay,
“The Joker’s Comedy of Existence,” published in Supervillains and Philosophy in 2009,
Moseley attempts to explain why Batman does not understand the Joker and what this
might mean with regards to the Joker’s “existence” or role in several Batman texts. After
establishing that the Joker is not “evil” but rather a “moral monster,” with his own set of
values, Moseley suggests that the Joker has the qualities of “many great philosophers”
(135) and may be the balance needed to keep Batman from tyranny, but concedes that
the issues are “difficult to resolve” (136). While all of these are interesting, it seems that
Moseley’s main goal is to have his readers look critically at the Joker rather than simply
write him off as a mad man. One claim that Mosley successfully makes is that the Joker
is not immoral, but rather a “moral monster” (131). He supports this claim with the
philosophers G.E.M. Anscombe and T.M. Scanlon who argue, “desiring something
consists in having a tendency to regard the thing as good” (qtd. in Moseley 131). With
this claim, we can begin to try and understand the Joker. Writing off something as just
“evil” or “inhuman” often keeps us from trying to understand it, and because Moseley’s
goal is to try to understand the Joker, this concept of moral action is important for him to
establish.
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Works Cited
Moseley, Daniel. “The Joker’s Comedy of Existence.” Supervillains and
Philosophy. Ed. Ben Dyer. Chicago: Open Court, 2009. 127-136. Print.