“Why so serious?”: Cripping Camp Performance in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight

Using as a case study Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film The Dark Knight, and building from recent work on disability and humor, the article explores the disabled body as a potential site of camp performance and outrageous parody. The Joker’s sartorial flair and his commitment to style over substance, it is argued, construct him as a variation of the Wildean homosexual dandy whose superficiality is politicized as a form of queer resistance to both capitalism and the institutionalized hierarchies of the state. Furthermore, the crip dimensions of the Joker’s drag performances – and in particular, the narrative agency with which he continually destabilizes the origins of his facial scar – extends that camp sensibility beyond sexuality to explore disability as performative process rather than a pathological state. Developing a concept of disability camp not only helps us to shake up the representational terrain of both queer studies and disability studies, but also provides new and exciting opportunities for theorizing the intersections of disability, humor, and performance.