I heard Alan Watts say somewhere that anxiety and laughter have the same origin, and that got me thinking, how is that even possible?
After giving it a lot of thought (like a true overthinker), I believe the Joker embodies what Alan Watts meant. Not in a way that life is a comedy through tragedy of sorts, but there is more nuance to it.
The source of anxiety is control, rather wanting to control all outcomes of your life, but not being able to do it, hence controlling more, and hence more anxiety. A positive closed loop, if you will.
The need to control arises from the need to build a structure for our lives. Structure is crucial; our society has structure, our family has structure, structure builds something solid, and rightly so. By implementing structure, we fit in.
But some people can never fit in, just like the Joker. In his endeavor not to fit into the structure, he is also above the structure, because he is able to see the duality of this structure.
In Alan Moore’s ‘The Killing Joke’, Joker’s whole plan is to torture Commissioner Gordon to madness to demonstrate that any “good” person can be driven insane by one horrific day, mirroring his own origin. He wants Batman to either kill him or go insane himself, thus proving Joker’s worldview that order and morality are a joke.
But I am not talking here about the blurred line between a victim and a villain; I am talking about control and spontaneity, or embracing authenticity. It is precisely at this point that when you relinquish control, and you step into spontaneity, which I would like to call the Joker’s move.
It is at this point that you can give your anxiety a new form, one of laughter and acceptance, and quietly land on your own two feet. Just like a cat thrown in the air, it doesn’t need to control its body but ultimately gets a soft landing.
So yes, just like everything has a dual nature, recently I learned that anxiety and laughter can be two sides of the same coin.