Joker Trailer 2 Review: 9 Ups & 3 Downs

2. Honestly, That LAUGH!

You have to talk about the laugh. For every actor who has ever played the Joker (and ever will), the laugh is an incredibly important part of his armoury. Todd Phillips, Joaquin Phoenix and Warner Bros know that they're onto a winner with Phoenix's version so much that they've stuck it front and centre in their marketing.

And they're right to be proud of it. There's something immediately infectious about Arthur's laugh and it's not because it's a pantomime affectation - as Jared Leto's was - it's that it seems to be an affliction for Arthur. It seems almost painful, like a tic that he has no control over. It's either him performing to hide his true self or it's an involuntary, pathological response, which is why we see him almost shake it off as he's walking in the trailer.

Interestingly, Phoenix has already explored where that laugh came from and it adds even more of a hook to this performance when you read this in conjunction with that scene in the trailer. He told Italian magazine Il Venerdi that he got his Joker laugh from a chilling phenomenon in the real world:

"I watched videos of people suffering from pathological laughter, a neurological disorder that makes individuals laugh uncontrollably."

It's so good it hurts.