About

Running Joker refers to several exploitable images of 2019 film Joker titular character Joker running, based on photographs made during the filming of one of the scenes of the movie. The exploitables have seen moderate use online, with the meme seeing a surge in popularity following the premiere of the film in October 2019.

Origin

On November 19th, 2019, SplashNews photographer Christopher Peterson made a series of photographs of actor Joaquin Phoenix, dressed in Joker costume, running through the New York during the filming of one of the scenes of the then-upcoming Joker film (photographs shown below). On the same day, multiple news outlets posted the photographs, including articles by Daily Mail,^[1] People^[2] and Evening Standard.^[3]

On November 20th, 2018, Redditor wcrispy posted one of the photographs to /r/photoshopbattles subreddit, suggesting that it should be used as an exploitable, with the post receiving over 22,700 upvotes in 10 months.^[4] In the thread, multiple users made submissions utilizing the exploitable (notable examples shown below).

Spread

On November 21st, 2018, an anonymous 4chan user launched a /co/ thread asking others to create us the exploitable in photoshops (notable submissions shown below).^[5]

In the following year, the exploitable saw moderate use online. On September 24th, 2019, Facebook user Jason Ibarra posted an edit of a camera shot of the Lionel Messi's goal against Bayern Munich to Footbal Autista Memes Facebook group, with the post receiving over 930 likes in three weeks (shown below, left).^[6] In the following weeks, the image was reposted multiple times, including an October 6th, repost by @wikiesqueletos Twitter^[7] account which gained over 2,700 retweets and 10,000 likes and reposts in /r/hmmm^[8] and /r/blursedimages ^[9] subreddits which received over 42,600 and 19,500 upvotes, respectively. Additionally, starting in October 2019, the image saw use as an object labeling meme (example shown below, right).^[10]

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References