The Last Laugh

  The Joker pumps Gotham full of laughing gas and goes on a crime spree.
  Original Airdate: September 22, 1992
  Episode # 4
  Rating: * 1/2

Did you ever wonder what the Adam West Batman TV show would have been like if they had played its absurd stories absolutely straight instead of winkingly "straight"? Probably not. Just to pose the question is to see why it would never work. There's a word for "straight and absurd." The word is "bad."

I'm sure that "The Last Laugh" was not made in a spirit of experimentation, but that's the only charitable way of looking at it. The episode has the kind of inane Joker plot that would strike a clever but limited TV writer as "typically comic book": the Joker floods the Gotham financial district with laughing gas and starts cleaning the place out; Batman stops him. It also has characters making asides to the audience, whether it is vaguely in character (the Joker) or not (Alfred), and tiresome little "comic" touches like Batman glaring at the Joker through a periscope before slugging said periscope.

But it also plays for melodrama: prolonged exposure to the gas will cause permanent insanity, a plot point that is helpfully and redundantly repeated when Alfred gets a snootful and then dropped altogether. And the bulk of the story is padded out with fight scenes that are extended, grim, and inefficient—testament to the way the story has defeated director Kevin Altieri, whose action scenes are usually lyrical expositions of space and movement. (Credit where credit is due, though: there is a remarkably vicious beating visited upon a robotic clown goon.)

Nor has the episode the uneasy, dream-like atmosphere of "Critters," where the mix of the comic and the melodramatic becomes a challenge to one's sense of reality. Instead, it just feels like a cynical attempt to give the audience what the audience presumably wants—Batman in action and the Joker in stitches—as though the audience hadn't long ago seen through and moved beyond that kind of stuff. Even Shirley Walker's score sounds retro, though that turns out to be not such a bad thing. It has an odd, seventies' police show "wackatta wackatta" kind of vibe to it—an intriguing choice, even if it sounds like it should belong with a different (and better) episode—maybe in something starring Bullock.

This was a pretty early episode in the production cycle, so it's understandable that it should have such an uncertain tone. As such, there's a kind of archaeological interest in discovering a story that stands semi-erect as an evolutionary "missing link": something between the primitivism of Superfriends and the fully realized series that we eventually got. And it's useful to have a reminder of what BTAS could have been: a show that played up the "cartoon" in "cartoon action show." But that's special pleading.

A final note, since I see no point in prolonging the agony. I don't care if it is April Fool's Day: Bruce Wayne shouldn't laugh here, and he certainly shouldn't be making jokes at the expense of a deeply discomfited Alfred.

Related Episodes
   * Critters

What Others Are Saying ...
"[L]ike Captain Clown, ... it purports to be goofy and whimsical, but a little pressure and it's revealed to be nothing more than a cold, passionless tool of an episode." –Alex Weitzman, The Big Cartoon Database