Batman: The Animated Series - "Joker's Favor"

“Now, look, my rude friend – we can’t have people cursing at each other on the freeway. It’s simply not polite! I’m just going to have to teach you some manners...”

Sad sack Charlie Collins (Ed Begley, Jr., at his shlubbiest) has had a rough life and a rougher day, but it’s about to get a whole lot worse after a traffic altercation with none other than The Joker (Mark Hamill). The Joker spares Charlie’s life in exchange for a favor to be called in at Joker’s pleasure... two years later, despite relocating in witness protection, Charlie gets the phone call he’s been dreading, and you can bet it’s no coincidence that Commissioner Gordon is being honored on the same night.

Look, the headline for this episode is that it’s the debut of Harley Quinn, arguably the most important and successful character introduced to the Batman canon in the last twenty-five years (and that includes Bane, who debuted in 1993, and Batman’s own son, Damian Wayne, introduced in 2006). And we’ll get to her in a minute, but lost in the shuffle of this episode’s historic nature is the fact that it’s a damned good episode, almost certainly the best of the four Joker episodes we’ve reviewed thus far. That’s entirely due to this being Paul Dini’s first episode writing The Joker, a character that I daresay no living writer “gets” as well as Dini. Dini understands that Joker ought to be equal parts deadly terrifying and genuinely, if uncomfortably, funny. And despite featuring Batman very little at all in this episode, something I’ve chastised other episodes for doing, “Joker’s Favor” goes one better by fashioning a story that could only happen in Batman’s world, exposing a little slice of the common man’s experience of this madcap metropolis.

One of the episode’s punchlines involves – spoiler warning for the rest of this paragraph – the revelation that The Joker’s “favor” is simply to have Charlie open a door... that’s a stroke of dark comedic genius. Dini deflates Charlie’s two years of suffering with a shaggy-dog gag, quickly followed up by the revelation that Joker plans to go back on his word and kill Charlie anyway by coating the doorknob with adhesive. “Of course it’s nonsense!” we realize, before it dawns on us, “No, of course he’ll kill him!” And the episode’s last laugh, naturally, will surprise you.

Paul Dini is, I daresay, the most underrated Batman writer of the last few years, and that’s even before we get to Harley Quinn, almost inarguably his greatest creation. The concept of a harlequin moll at Joker’s side is so perfect that it’s almost unfathomable it hadn’t happened in the 53 years Batman had been around thus far, and it’s almost impossible to imagine The Joker without Harley Quinn. I’ll have more to say about Ms. Quinn when we get to some of the Harley-centric episodes down the line, but suffice it to say that Arleen Sorkin’s Jersey squeak is the perfect counterpart to Mark Hamill’s pseudo-theatrical growl, though her joke about cosmetology school rings somewhat false in a world where we’ve seen (or read) “Mad Love.”

In short, “Joker’s Favor” is just about a perfect Joker episode, and it succeeds at being a great Batman episode too, with the Dark Knight getting a tender moment to laud his colleague Commissioner Gordon before running the gauntlet through a museum exhibit turned death trap. In these moments, Dini understands that Batman’s great appeal is that he is thoroughly human, but the most exaggerated and frankly awesome version of humanity. Above all, Dini knows how to tell a dynamite self-contained story in little more than twenty minutes, proving himself – and I think the numbers on my Top 10 list will bear witness – the undisputed master of this form.

Original Air Date: September 11, 1992

Writer: Paul Dini

Director: Boyd Kirkland

Villains: The Joker (Mark Hamill) and Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin)

Next episode: “Vendetta,” in which Bullock takes it personally.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇