Mini Joker

Submission 28,525

Part of a series on Dancing Joker. [View Related Entries]

About

Mini Joker refers to an edited image of Joker from the 2019 movie of the same name, edited to make the character appear disproportionally small. Following the premiere of the film in October 2019, the image, often used in combination with the Dancing Joker and Mini Keanu Reeves memes, has been circulated as an exploitable and a reaction.

Origin

On July 23rd, 2019, a set of three promotional photos for 2019 film Joker were released. One of the photos showed titular character Joker, portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, dancing on street stairs in a clown outfit (shown below, left).^[1]^[2] On October 6th, 2019, Twitter user @wikiesqueletos posted an edited version of the photograph showing Joker with disproportionately short stature (shown below, right), with the tweet receiving over 560 retweets and 2,300 likes in three weeks.^[3] The original author of the edited image is unknown.

Spread

The edited image did not see significant spread until on October 8th, 2019, Redditor SoDeep9401 posted a cropped version of the image to /r/hmmm subreddit, where it gained over 15,800 upvotes (shown below, left).^[4] On the same day, iFunny user IamNoble posted the cropped image.^[5] On the same day, Redditor Atlas-303 posted a reaction meme based on the image to /r/dankmemes subreddit, gaining over 29,700 upvotes in two weeks (shown below, right).^[6]

On October 9th, 2019, Redditor ttracs149 posted an edit featuring Dancing Joker and Mini Joker next to each other, with the post receiving over 69,200 upvotes in two weeks (shown below, left).^[7] On the same day, an unknown user posted a similar template with Mini Joker facing the other way, with Redditors Pangolin257 and GergiTheGreat posting notable memes based on the image to /r/HistoryMemes and /r/dankmemes (shown below, center and right).^[8]^[9]

In the following days, formats featuring Mini Joker and related formats gained significant popularity online, primarily on Reddit.