Why so Serious?: Smile, Joker and Wittgenstein

“‘Smiling’ (Wittgenstein writes) is our name for an expression in a normal play of expressions’ (Zettel§527). Thus I would not be able to react to a fixed smile imprinted on a paralysed face as I do to the smile of someone who smiles at me in the ordinary course of affairs. A stranger in a bus drops his ticket. I pick it up and give it to him. He smiles as he thanks me. I smile back. ‘No wonder,’ says Wittgenstein, ‘we have this concept [of a smile] in these circumstances’ (ibid.). The significance of the smile, indeed its identity as a smile, is bound up with this background. Remove the background or alter it radically, freeze the smile so that it no longer varies with the circumstances, and you no longer have a smile.” 

(Dilham, 1999: 126)

What if, the smile freezes? It doesn’t vary with the circumstances. Do we still call it a smile? Look at the character of Joker, from the Batman comics. He has a smile, a permanent smile. Scars through his lips, that made him smile permanently. He is proud of his permanent smile, because that smile is his mask. He laughs at others through that mask. He knows how he got those scars; he tells stories about it, each time different from the previous one, which makes him even more mysterious, just like his smile. Or is it a smile?

We normally like the people who smile. But, a permanent smile is not a signifier of a normal, circumstantially evaporating and changing smile. It becomes, most of the time, a signifier of cunningness, treachery and disguise.

Beware of the ever-smiling person!!