The Joker

Cause Before Symptom - With Your Host James Carner

synopsis: In this hour we trace the joker from ancient carnival to modern pop culture and show how a sanctioned figure of inversion quietly became a cultural grammar that normalizes exception, erodes reverence, and baptizes mockery as virtue. We move from Bakhtin’s carnivalesque and Rome’s Saturnalia into medieval Feast of Fools, follow the tarot Fool’s liminal initiation into the nineteenth-century playing-card Joker, and then track the image’s ritual adoption by elite fraternal circles and its mass marketing in comics, film, and memes. Along the way we diagnose the devil’s tactic: using humor as plausible deniability to trivialize holiness, weaponize cruelty, and teach a generation that cleverness can substitute for conscience. The show closes with pastoral tools for discernment that do not ban joy but reclaim it—teaching reparative humor, restoring practices of reverence, and rehearsing the gospel’s holy inversion so laughter heals rather than hardens.