Film

Fans Lose Their Minds As Zack Snyder Puts The Ultimate Joker Meme In ‘Justice League’

The infamous meme quote will finally be said by the Joker on screen.

by Merryana Salem  15 February 2021
we-live-in-a-society

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The latest trailer for  Zack Snyder’s mythological cut of the Justice League film proves once and for all that we do, in fact, live in a society.

The infamous meme quote is spoken in the trailer by none other than Jared Leto’s divisive version of the Joker. People are aptly losing their minds over it too because the phrase “we live in a society” has been a Joker-related meme for at least a decade.

The thing is, “we live in a society,” is a line often attributed to the Joker from the comics. However, the character has never actually said it.

The earliest reference to the phrase on the internet is from a viral clip of an episode of Seinfeld. A second season episode titled, ‘The Chinese Restaurant’, to be precise. In the episode, George Costanza says the phrase as part of a rant reacting to someone taking a payphone he was about to use.

The clip was circulated on many gamer/gaming Reddit threads and boards, usually in combination with separate Joker related memes gamers used to express how misunderstood their intellect was, eventually leading to the wide cultural misattribution of the phrase to the Joker. The meme has since evolved to ridicule those who think they’re being deep.

None of this stopped people campaigning for YEARS to get the Joker to say the infamous meme line in canon. One 2018 petition campaigning for Joaquin Phoenix to say the line in 2019’s Joker garnered almost 59,000 signatures and is still climbing.

Judging from the latest trailer for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Snyder is the one who has finally gone and done it. With the most meme-able Joker, no less. The clip sees Leto’s Joker straight-jacketed uttering the phrase as a warning to Affleck’s Batman.

“We live in a society,” he says, “where honour is a distant memory. Isn’t that right, Batman?”

We certainly do, Mr Leto. Personally, I can’t stop thinking that we live in a society where the line is played over the trailer’s title card, and the trailer editor isn’t celebrated for their unadulterated comedic genius.

Merryana Salem is a proud Wonnarua and Lebanese–Australian writer, critic, teacher, researcher and podcaster on most social media as @akajustmerry. If you want, check out her podcast, GayV Club where she gushes about LGBT rep in media with her best friend. Either way, she hopes you ate something nice today.