It's Simple, We Kill The Batman

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About

"It's Simple, We Kill the Batman" is a catchphrase stemming from the 2008 Batman film The Dark Knight^[1] directed by Christopher Nolan. It is often used in image macros to portray the subject as a scheming character.

Origin

In the film, the villain known as the "Joker" (played by Heath Ledger) appears at a gathering of Gotham's underground criminals. After giving a short speech about Batman, one of the criminals asks what the Joker proposes they do, to which the Joker replies, "It's simple: We, uh, kill the Batman."

Expand Transcript

The Joker: A guy… like me… Look, listen. I know why you choose to have your little group therapy sessions here in broad daylight. I know why you're afraid to go out at night; the Batman. You see, Batman has shown Gotham your true colors, unfortunately. Dent, he's just the beginning. And, and as for the television's so-called plan? Batman has no jurisdiction. He'll find him, and make him squeal. I know the squealers when I see them and… [points at Lau] The Chechen: What do you propose? The Joker: It's simple: We, uh, kill the Batman.

Spread

The first Urban Dictionary^[2] entry was submitted on August 30th, 2008 by user Inco33 who defined the phrase as "the solution to all of life's problems." On June 19th, 2011, an image macro was uploaded to the image hosting site Imgur^[5] featuring a photo of Jocelyn Wildenstein (a.k.a. "Cat Woman") captioned with "It's simple. Kill the Batman." On October 16th, 2011, the Tumblr blog "money, guys, apples, dicks"^[4] published a photo of an overweight man in clown makeup with the caption "it's simple, we eat the batman" and received 28,000 notes within 3 months. The same day, the image was submitted to the /r/funny^[3] subreddit titled "It's simple--we eat the batman."

On January 11th, 2012, The Washington Post^[6] published an interview with Josh Fonner, the subject of both the "eat the batman" and "fat emo" images.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Search queries for "simple kill the batman" had a brief spike in July of 2008 when the film The Dark Knight was initially released and did not pick up again until June of 2011