MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan Is Outraged that Fox News is Outraged Over a Pregnant ‘Joker’ Comic Where He Wasn’t Actually Pregnant

MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan was outraged Sunday evening over the outrage on Fox News over a comic book story about the Batman villain the Joker, in the latest iteration of the perpetual motion machine that is the outrage cycle between America’s cable news networks.

The kerfuffle began with an 8-page “backup story,” a bonus mini-story, included at the end of a comic book in the series called The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing by Matthew Rosenberg.

The story is presented to readers as a one-off and out of continuity to the overall Batman canon. According to a Substack post by Parker Malloy, the plot involved the Joker flirting with a sorceress named Zantanna, who “casts a spell on the Joker, causing him to fall down” in a river bed where he “accidentally ingests a bunch of mud.”

The plot gets increasingly absurd from there; the Joker awakens the next morning with a giant stomach, thinks he’s pregnant, but then vomits up a mud creature that looks like a “miniature clone” of the Joker.

Malloy describes the story as entirely “played for laughs” and “intended as a silly throwback to the Silver Age comics that portrayed the Joker as silly/funny rather than the more familiar homicidal maniac” like Joaquin Phoenix or Heath Ledger’s memorably deranged portrayals of the clown-faced villain in the movies.

As Malloy noted, various conservatives on Twitter and commentators on Fox News expressed outrage over the comic, but mostly omitted or misrepresented the full context of this specific comic: that it was a “standalone” story intended to be a humorous farce, portrayed the Joker as vomiting a magical mud creature and not actually pregnant or transgender, and was in a book rated T+ (“teen plus,” for readers 15 years of age or older) — in other words, not directed at young children.

Still, the Fox News hosts blasted the comic for “doubling down on woke,” ruining comics’ ability to serve as “escapism for children,” and even being “disgusting.”

Hasan addressed the controversy in a segment on The Mehdi Hasan Show Sunday evening, joined by Malloy as a guest to discuss her Substack post.

The GOP’s “culture war nonsense” regarding gas stoves was the “most insane act of faux outrage this week,” said Hasan, until he heard about Fox News’ coverage of this Joker comic, which he sarcastically described as being handled with “their typical nuanced and restrained coverage,” before cuing up several clips.

“Here’s the thing,” said Hasan after the Fox News clips aired, “that comic book storyline has nothing to do with trans people,” summarizing the storyline of Joker vomiting up his mud baby mini-me.

It’s possible that the Fox News commentators didn’t know the full facts about the comic’s plot, said Hasan, but regardless, he quoted from Malloy’s writing, this was “an absolutely over the top response that needs to stop now.”

Hasan and Malloy then spent the next few minutes discussing “which culture war story was the dumbest of the week” and how “it was a big week for fake outrage.”

The “fake outrage” on Fox News was, in the view of both Hasan and Malloy, part of the right pushing for a “total erasure of trans people, even from works of fiction.”

The complaints from the right that they could not “escape this stuff” arose from their tendency to “see it everywhere, even where it’s not,” said Malloy.

“It’s not just the dishonesty that gets me, it’s the hypocrisy,” said Hasan. “The right, as you and I know, loves to accuse Democrats and liberals of being easily triggered, of being snowflakes, but how much more snowflake-y can you get than freaking out over the genders of fictional comic book characters or M&Ms?”

“It doesn’t get any more fragile than that,” replied Malloy. “More fragile than the thin candy shells of the M&Ms, I suppose.”

It would be fairly easy to play a “mad libs” game with this segment and switch around the networks and topics where one partisan political side found some small incident or comment, took it out of context, and used it to both attack the other side and claim that the other side was attacking them.

Over and over again, we have this ouroboros of outrage, with the one side getting angry about something, distorting or omitting key context,  demanding a strong response, while the opposing side gets mad at the outrage, spins up their own outrage and says they’re been targeted, and everyone just screams at each other until the next Dr. Seuss book or M&M fashion scandal comes along to spark a new battle.

We have governors signing bills banning critical race theory in schools where it’s never been taught but the legislation is leading schools to reject books about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. And, as Mall0y and other reporters have pointed out, numerous bills being advanced by Republican state legislators across the country are seeking to ban drag shows but are drafted in an overly broad and restrictive way that would prohibit wide swaths of entertainment offerings that the majority of Americans would not view as inappropriate.

For example, a Nebraska bill would make it a misdemeanor for anyone under 19 years old to attend a drag show (or under 21 if alcohol is served), which the legislation defines as “a performance in which … The main aspect of the performance which exhibits a gender identity that is different than the performer’s gender assigned at birth using clothing, makeup, or other physical markers; and … The performer sings, lip syncs, dances, or otherwise performs before an audience for entertainment.”

Actors portraying people of the opposite gender has been a common plot device for centuries, in multiple Shakespeare plays and award-winning films from 1959’s Some Like It Hot to 1982’s Victor, Victoria, and usually without any sexual content involved. (In Some Like It Hot, Marilyn Monroe’s effervescent portrayal of “Sugar,” a bandmate of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon’s cross-dressing musicians, displayed her trademark charms; the men’s predicaments were played for laughs, not titillation.)

Arguably the 1993 PG-13 film Mrs. Doubtfire and its Broadway musical adaptation would fall under the Nebraska bill’s definition, with the lead role originally played by Robin Williams as a divorced father dressing as an elderly female British nanny in order to spend more time with his kids. Most reasonable people view it as a lighthearted family film, not an insidious attempt to indoctrinate children into anything.

Legislation that would make it a crime for a teenager to attend a Shakespeare play or watch Mrs. Doubtfire is, to put it mildly, absolutely bonkers. But the Fox News on-air personalities weren’t advocating for such legislation.

Going back and watching the full segment, it’s unquestionably feeding into the culture war hysteria that Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson have peddled to their audiences for years, but Todd Piro bemoaning that “this is the world in which we live now” as the Fox News chyron complained about a “pregnant trans Joker” for a comic in which the Joker was neither pregnant nor trans should be mocked for the ridiculousness it is, not met with its own mirror-image hysteria.

Because the trouble with an outrage battle like this is, the longer the fight goes on, both sides tend to end up yelling more, listening less, and demonizing their opponent more, getting simultaneously farther from the actual truth and from any chance at a reasonable compromise.

America is a politically divided nation of over 330 million people. I remain steadfastly devoted to the belief that we are stronger together than apart, and that most Americans are fundamentally good people who want what’s best for their families, their communities, and their country.

When you see something on television or on our social media feeds that makes you furious, take a moment to ask a few questions. Am I being shown the full and fair context of the original content? Is it something that could actually affect me and my family? Is this legislation that might actually pass, or a stunt bill designed to outrage or drive fundraising rather than become law? What are the motivations of the person telling me I should be outraged?

This all takes time and effort, but in the end is more productive than just walking around mad at the world all the time. Being “always angry” might work fine for The Hulk — forgive my mingling of DC and Marvel fandoms — but it’s an exhausting way for us regular mortals to live.

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.