If you don’t know about Joker’s Trick, I both envy and pity you. It’s a nightmare of a social media account — a monument to intentionally bad jokes in the “Weird Twitter” style and guys who dress up like Heath Ledger’s Joker for Halloween. Every. Single. Year. If you live online, you’ve probably at least seen similar profiles, like Da Share Z0ne. Joker’s Trick is a lot like that, but more specifically themed around the DC Comics character. And now you can live the nightmare 24/7. Joker’s Trick is on Twitch.
I honestly don’t know what I expected from it, but this is pretty close. If you don’t have the courage to watch it yourself, the Joker’s Trick channel is basically a collection of low resolution JPGs featuring various movie incarnations of the Joker (and sometimes the protagonist from Persona 5), overlaid with godawful early 2000s ringtone music and laughter. It also frequently features a looping GIF of the dolphin from Banjo Kazooie. Other times the music cuts out, only to be replaced with a low droning sound and a spiral, like one of those hypno porn AMVs. I’ve watched all of this for about an hour straight now because I am spiritually bankrupt.
Perhaps my favorite part about the Joker’s Trick channel is its chat. Unlike a lot of Twitch channels, you can’t hide the chat altogether. The stream itself superimposes all the comments on top of its very, very copyrighted Warner Bros. movie footage and old viral videos. This also produces exactly what you might expect: a lot of people trying to be funny or get channel-borne memes still in their infancy off the ground.
Some people just can’t get into the meaningless spirit of the whole thing — this reflexive artistic reaction to the state of our doomed world. They tell these Joker-lings to stop talking, so they don’t cover up the screen, or say they don’t get it. Other people just copy-paste Wiki information about various versions of the Joker. The best running gag I’ve seen so far, though, is that unintentionally unfunny man, Ricky Gervais, is actually the Joker. Which… fair.
As I’m writing this, the channel just switched to playing generic country music over images of rodeo clowns and various Jokers in cowboy hats. Oops! Now it’s footage of Twin Peaks with a laugh track. What a trick that was, folks. You love to see it.
*in a britesh voice* You are the weakest link……Goodbye. -Joker
— joker’s trick (@jokers_trick) August 19, 2019
I’m curious to see how long this can last. Is all this Dada madness prerecorded? Are the hypnotic intermissions actually breaks meant to give whoever is behind Joker’s Trick taking time to “edit” more fever dreams? Or do they simply wipe my memory of the previous few minutes, over and over, keeping me trapped in a loop of pained delight as I endlessly rediscover just how bad this is to watch?
Even if the barely produced production doesn’t become too exhausting, the Twitch cops might come a knocking. That sure is a lot of unlicensed material up on the channel. But maybe that’s fine, too. Twitch is a lawless place these days — befitting of Joker-like anarchy. Except, y’know, Joker’s Trick is all in good fun. Whereas Twitch actually does some pretty shitty stuff.
Anyway. I think the stream is just… playing a full episode of Deadwood now. I should probably tune in to find out what kind of monkeyshines this Joker character will get up to with this one.
