WARHOL AS THE JOKER

A gay guy in a fright wig hangs out with a bored rich girl named “Baby Jane.” It’s not Andy Warhol and Jane Holzer but a story arc on the 1960s TV version of Batman. In two episodes that aired in March 1967, the Joker (Cesar Romero) takes up art and has an unwitting partner in “Baby Jane” Towser. That name can’t be a coincidence: Warhol superstar “Baby Jane” Holzer had already appeared in several Warhol films, notably Batman Dracula (1964), and been profiled by Tom Wolfe. One Batman episode’s title, “Pop Goes the Joker,” is a clear reference to the pop movement.

Despite that, there’s no pop art per se—unless you count a fight-scene title card that rips off Ed Ruscha’s 1962 OOF. It seems the Joker has traditionalist tastes in art (“I swear it on a stack of Blue Boys!”) and covets Renaissance paintings. To get them, he turns to the most monstrous of all cons—contemporary art, naturally. The result, credited to TV writer Stanford Sherman, is a time capsule of middlebrow views on the avant-garde. In a weird way, it can be read as an allegory of postmodernism.

-William Poundstone