Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker Gets the Last Laugh

If you’re looking for a life lesson by watching The People’s Joker, here’s one: Never date a guy who dated Batman. It’s hard to measure up. Or down, depending on your point of view.

Here’s another one: When you make a parody of a major studio’s cash cow—like, say, their Batman franchise—talk to your lawyers starting on day one. Actor/writer/director Vera Drew did just that. “I worked with lawyers the entire time,” Drew tells us. “I was working with lawyers every step of the way.” That was 2022.

Drew, a trans woman, chose to tell her life story through the Batman lens. On-screen Vera is a comedian who’s taken on the Joker’s persona. She cannot get onstage in Gotham City, so Vera partners with her friend the Penguin (superbly played by Nathan Faustyn), and the duo start their own outlaw comedy club. Vera starts dating another comic who is, ironically, another Joker. More familiar characters show up, including the B-man himself. Also in the mix is Vera’s somewhat shrill mom and, seen in flashbacks, a young Vera pre-transition (played to perfection by Griffin Kramer).

There’s no doubt about it—this is Batman’s world, but it’s Drew’s very twisted and obviously satirized version. Think “bizarro-Batman.”

So when Drew got a strongly worded email from a corporate giant that said, “Uh, we don’t consider The People’s Joker to be a parody, so stop screening it,” she was surprised. (To be clear, the corporate giant was never publicly identified, and it wasn’t an actual cease-and-desist letter.)

“Everything in it is true for me and my life. I came up in comedy. The relationship of the mother in it, the boyfriend—all of that actually happened to me. That’s why it should fall under fair use. And it’s obviously a very different version of those characters than you would ever see in any of those studio movies,” she says.

Unfortunately, the legal skirmish overshadowed the film’s release. At the time, Drew pulled the film from festival screenings, and since then she’s had a few more screenings that were untroubled by the parody police. Now the film is set for screening at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston this month.

The film was shot over a tight, five-day schedule on a shoestring budget. “We didn’t censor ourselves with what can we afford because we knew we couldn’t afford anything,” laughs Drew.

Eventually she financed the film with her own money. Another life lesson. “That’s one of the things they tell you not to do, of course. But throughout the project, I was doing lots of things I wasn’t supposed to do.”

Like making a movie without thinking it might be seen by an audience one day? Yes, Drew and company did that. “Some of the magic of the movie was that we were all of the mindset that the movie was not going to be that big of a deal,” Drew notes. “We didn’t put a lot of pressure on ourselves. We were able to take it to places because we were acting like nobody was watching. There’s a real freedom to that.

“I probably would have made a different film if I had been thinking that anybody was ever going to see the film. I never fathomed that I’d be getting interviewed about it or do screenings. We just screened it in Nashville, and there was a line out the door of people waiting to meet me. I never imagined that. I thought I was making a movie just for myself and my friends.”

LGBTQ audiences have loved the film. Comic book and Batman fans have loved the film. Even critics have loved the film. “Most of the people that I’ve met through the movie screenings are really young. In Nashville, most of the people were under 21. And meeting young trans people, while I don’t think of myself as a role model of any sort, I want to be some kind of good role model for these young people.

“Young people ask me how can they get into movies, and I certainly can’t tell them to take out a huge loan. What I do tell them is to not wait for somebody to give you a green light. Give it to yourself. You’ll never get permission to do the thing you want to do. Just do it.” 

WHAT: The People’s Joker
WHEN: August 8, 7 p.m.
WHERE: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Brown Auditorium, 1001 Bissonnet
INFO: mfah.org