The first time that most people heard about Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker was in September 2022, when the independently-produced dark comedy made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival — until, that is, screenings were canceled after Drew received a letter from Warner Bros.
Now, though, her wild movie is coming to theaters, and Drew tells Consequence that “I’ve been using this press cycle with the movie to really go out of my way to talk about how and why it’s protected by parody law and fair use. Because it’s like The Naked Gun — it’s a parody film. That’s what we’re doing here, but we’re doing it in a way where there’s no precedent for it. So I understand why it’s edgy and a little weird for some people — because nobody’s ever taken their life and, and made a Joker parody with it. Only I could make this type of movie, with this perspective on these characters and this particular sort of alchemy to it.”
Specifically, Drew says, The People’s Joker is a story of her “processing a lot of really traumatic and horrible stuff I went through. The movie really is about coming out to a family that isn’t affirming of your gender identity, and the process of getting into a very codependent relationship.”
Plus, it’s a comedy, but it’s also a comedy about being a comedian, and how certain institutions in the comedy world have created a toxic environment. Drew says she began doing sketch comedy at the age of 13, performing in Second City shows as a teenager. “Comedy was always a space for me where I could, prior to coming out, really explore identity. Like, I never did standup in anything but drag. But it also kept me in this state of perpetual irony poisoning. Like, I think on some level, comedy for me was this high concept self-harm at times. So I really I needed to process all of that. And I don’t know that anybody would’ve ever wanted to watch a movie where I’m processing that without jokes.”
So there are a lot of great jokes in The People’s Joker, as the film’s heroine, living in an askew version of Batman’s world, hopes to join that universe’s version of Saturday Night Live — it’s called UCB Live in the film, but the creator is still known as Lorne Michaels.
This is drawing from Drew’s personal experience, and her perspective on comedy culture today. “I want to qualify everything I’m about to say with that there have definitely been many periods in my life where my dream was to be on SNL.”
“That said…” she laughs, before continuing. “I’ve always really thought SNL, more than anything, is like just an arm of our military industrial complex. It’s a propaganda machine. It decides elections. I don’t know that we would’ve gotten two terms of George W. Bush if Will Ferrell didn’t have such a good impression of him. And it also really normalizes oppressors, like having Trump on there when he was running for President or bringing back Shane Gillis when he was fired from the show. To me, that show and Lorne Michaels, they really epitomize what the US political system is like.”