The novelist John Gardner once classified a certain type of hack writer as the “disPollyanna” — a curdled optimist whose wounded, childlike idealism is inverted and weaponized in the form of “crude jokes and images, slang phrases borrowed from foreign languages” meant solely “to shock prudes.”

The disPollyanna “simplemindedly long[s] for goodness, justice, and sanity” while cloaking their bromides in stock nihilism and abstraction. As Gardner concluded: “No one is shocked, of course, though a few may misread their annoyance as shocked.” In the hands of midwit provocateur Todd Phillips, the annoyance inspired by his comic book sequel Joker: Folie à Deux approaches levels requiring intervention by an international weapons regulator.