The Worst Idea Of All Time - 07: Coulrophobia

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

We've got it all - running water in the urinal, personal agency and a 7th watch of Joker 2. Tim and Guy examine the brutal reality of the seven times at the trough. Stuffed, so completely, with Joker 2.Monty is steadfast in his belief that he simply will not be bossed around by this movie, and breaks down (with the detail and vocabulary of a decades-long sports commentator) the back and forth of the boiz' latest fight. Guyguy also puts up a spirited defence of Steve Coogan's performance within the context of the borderline impossible acting job he had to perform. And let us not forget the brilliant Catherine Keener.Tim meanwhile wants to dig deep into the nature of comedy (again), clowns and what the movie was trying to do with all three of those things.This art project can only exist with the helper of generous supporters like you, via twioat.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The worst idea of all time! Worse idea of all time! A fresh way to lose your mind. Your boys are bad with what you need. The worst things, then life are free. Worst idea of all time. That was idea of all time. A brand you ain't a rich your mind.

What's the worst idea of all time? Yeho She'll be coming round the mountain Coming round the mountain She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes She'll be riding six white horses when she comes Yeha She'll be riding six white horses when she comes

Yeha She'll be riding six white horses riding six white horses she'll be riding six white horses when she comes singing aye aye aye yippy yippy yipy aye singing aye aye aye yippy yoooo sing an eye aye aye yipy yipy yipy i aye yippy yippy yipy i yippy yippy yipy i good welcome along to seventh seven screenings of um joke two sure and i'll put this to you tim go on what i what's left to say what if anything is left to say what if anything is left to to say or perhaps perhaps you feel there's still a lot to say

I know one thing I want to say I want to start paying attention to the performances given by Steve Coogan and Lady Gaga day after day you want to put look I understand that is a want for us both but I can you know I'm going to watch the movie as it comes to me

I have been watching Steve Coogan lately Steve Kugan's not doing great. I don't think he's got the staying power or perhaps the talent we thought he had. He does, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let us contain our criticisms of Steve Kugan exclusively to his performance. And by my count, the fifth, sixth and seventh screenings of Joker 2. Yeah. For Zic.

If you're listening and not watching, the sound you can hear is the urinal behind us here in the men's bathroom. Cleaning itself. which is a credit to it because I have been keeping tabs on this specific urinal and it was a concern borderline belief that it did not have self-cleaning facilities and so it's happy to see running water here at Shay guys yeah if if anything that's the best possible time that that could have happened yeah because for the next you know however long we spend talking to each other Yeah

We will know that that urinal Yes Is the cleanest It can currently be Save for a third party Or us getting involved With a proper deep clean Yeah

As it stands Yeah We're in great shape We're in great shape With regards to how clean the urinal is Right in this moment Yeah Okay

So that's no longer If it was even on the table of things to I'm not kidding when I say this and I think like the lack of sleep I've had in the last two days

there's a lot to do with this but we're so close to each other and we're under pretty crazy lighting conditions when I look at you I see Joker face like all the shapes

and like my brain is painting even just lightly like the I know exactly where the triangles go for your eye makeup it's beautiful It's scary, dude

I don't like it It's an iconic look And it's not just the joke of that look That's a clown look And you know clowns Clowns have such powerful marketing Or such powerful branding Or recognition

That people Know to have a fear of clowns That's how big clowns are That it is a clinical fear you can have Of clowns Diagnosable Yeah would we call that good branding though

I'd call it powerful marketing okay sure yeah it is I guess you could have a phobia of anything though right well you could you could yeah you could but like you know for it to bump into the upper echelon of a known and not like a publicly kind of known phobia

and it is common yeah I guess this is the thing about clowns where they exist in this sort of shall we say spectrum of entertainment to play in the sandpit that the movie has provided us with a clown has all of these tragic elements

like they're always sort of a tragic figure um and I guess we're supposed to be laughing at the misfortune of someone else which perhaps is where Todd Phillips was trying to go with this we when we watch a clown

is supposed to be laughing at the not with yeah a powerful figure oh and also they're scary we were talking about clown phobia they do they can do but there's some like performance

of comedy about walking up to the line of scary I came up with this thing a few years ago which I probably have just read or heard someone say but it's always stay with me comedy is just surprising an audience in the right way and a clown like when you get surprised you can

be in fact usually you're scared there's the most common thing so the first part of comedy is you get a little bit scared by what's happened and then it gets wrapped in a safer context of like we're not in trouble so we can laugh at it well yeah the the

context is the security blanket you're describing yes yeah yeah it's a knowledge that it's like I mean this is going

to be the cleanest urinal in Auckland I reckon the wash rate on that is probably like a cycle every how long

five minutes I tell you what there's a movement sensor on the roof oh so per us being it I think that'll be

for the lights not for the water I'd be very impressed if they rigged up a motion sensor on the plumbing don't you think yeah what do you think about what I have to say about clowns and comedy starting as a shocking surprise and then once you learn that you're safe then it can become comedy there was some like you said some words you said some things that resonated

with me or that I could connect to and comprehend and you said some things which either by virtue of the way you were saying them or the way I was listening to them I could not quite that's cool and that's fair that's you know that's fine that's life yeah that is life you know what it's it's smacked of uh this screening the credits roll to the song that's life and that like that you know that to us that's a kick in the fucking teeth and it is so reminiscent of grown-ups to end credits rolling with live every moment love every day and it took us many watches to sort of figure that out we were like holy shit this thing is going at us it's fighting back it's hitting tim and guy we thought we were making fun of the movie uh-uh the

movie's making fun of us do you think that's what's happened here is this is joker too making fun of tim and guy yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean it has to be i uh yeah uh yeah yeah I will say, though, I'm not going to be bossed around by this movie. And I know you're not, because I saw you watch that movie. And you watched it, you didn't let, at no point did you let the movie get on top of you. You didn't give it the chance. You were evasive. you are to the movie or to you not to me to the movie's efforts to pin you down i see

you were you were evasive you were you know you were you counter-attacked you the way you handled yourself you know you you started exercising in front of the movie you started wrestling the movie into you know a situation that you were taking something from that you were happy in and and i just remembered the words i said after i done all my preceptive's and jumping jacks and i said i have agency yeah to the room yeah and then you know at the end of the movie when the credits were rolling i you were still watching and i sort of i went back and i put the movie on to begin again and i looked at you to see how you would react and you weren't even looking at me the person who had done that to you you were looking

at the screen yes you were looking at the movie as though to say i'm not scared of you like you were saying you sort of you put your backup you were you staunched out the movie and that's not to say the movie didn't get a couple of licks on you it absolutely did no doubt about it but i just think you know the way you carried yourself um there's something to be learned from that and there's potentially like a repeatable function because i will say it doesn't matter if how hard you work to go somewhere where you're you know you're mentally more comfortable or stimulated either this movie or experiments slash review technique like it doesn't matter how long you can get somewhere else and how happy you are there this is a wrap around experience yeah it is undeniable it's

it is bigger and longer than what we are capable of doing but you you still bossed it i'm trying really hard a couple of things one is that uh you asked me during this screening you said is this hard and i said yes this is really hard and then i said no this it's not hard what we're doing isn't hard it is deeply unpleasant yeah what's what is what are the distinguishing features between something that is hard and something that is well this is this sort of in a way brings me to my second thought which is the experience of the movie now is a thing that washes over me like i am desperately i'm just putting all my energy into keeping my eyeballs focused on that screen because that's the fair and right thing to do and

be listening to the movie and the movie and the movie isn't coming at me like either good challenging movie might feel like the movie is engulfing me it's more of an experience of it's pouring out of the screen yeah yeah like ocean and I just enveloping me I'm so

with you and it's it is you've got to pick your technique pretty well when you're in that situation because if you you can't fight the ocean

realistically you'll never bested the ocean so there is a combination of um being smart about it keep your head on stay calm i think is the main thing that is so paramount for us right now the thing i need to tell myself right now is just you got to just just stay calm if anyone is um playing along at home i hope you're writing this stuff down because this is from the top this is great advice you've got to I know there's a lot of stuff going on and we've got a lot of this more to do but just

just focus on what's happening right now you're okay it's all it's okay and it's going to be okay but you've got to stay calm don't freak out yeah if we could just circle back to Steve Coogan's performance I do agree that I

think he's I was so happy to see him the first time I could sort of wave off anything that followed but he's really struggling to hang tough with Joaquin yeah yeah yeah yeah like

Steve Coogan might still be a very good actor Joaquin Phoenix is just he's so good well and Joaquin is so in this character and invested in this movie and Steve is basically a day player it doesn't matter even if you're the best in the business like you can actually

potentially see the challenge of uh making this movie and communicating what this movie is supposed to be to an audience through the medium of considering steve kugan coming in to perform on it for one day because here's a guy who who would have showed up proper it would have showed up prepared you would have done his best as a professional lend all his lines and he would have worked as hard as he could on the day yeah and i'm sure sure he would have walked out of there and said i don't know how that went you know and and you know i think it would be easy as an actor for him to assume that responsibility of uncertainty and be like i don't know if i gave them what they wanted yeah and i think it would be very validating to then see

the movie and understand it didn't matter how i showed up on that day there was nothing i could have done differently i don't think his accent is especially strong i think he hasn't placed in a and so it is very broadly just someone doing an American accent and it is kind of you know it is quite jarring in a way but I also think there is nothing else he could have done to walk off the set yeah that day and be like I don't know if I got it right like it was absolutely there was no absolutely there was no world in which he could you know get it get it right on the day and at the same time he would have walked on the set being like but Joaquin really got it yeah And so that would be... It's like playing a game with a... It's like, here's what it is. It's playing a game with a sibling when you're kids. And every move you make, they go, no, that's not how you play and add a new role.

And they are completely... That's Joaquin Phoenix. It's just like, you are operating on my terrain, which I've terraformed personally. That's right. And Steve Coogan says up and he goes, okay, I've read a lot of... about the game, come here to play the game. I've actually been playing the game for a while. So I'll jump on in and play the game. And then Joaquin's like, no, there's a cricket bat involved. And he grabs a cricket bat and he says, you touch the cricket bat. That's minus

five points penalty. That is, honestly, I think not a bad analogy for what I think Steve was up against. But the other thing for Joaquin, because I think the analogy is accurate, but I think the way that Joaquin, the actor and, you know, communicator on set, embodying Arthur Fleck would not have been so generous as to offer explicit instruction on what you're going for. He would have looked at, he would have thought that

everything he said while he would have looked at the cricket bat and then looked back at Steve Coogan, you know, and it is up to him to insure it an unknowable thing that has just been introduced. Now while we're here in this space critiquing acting performance, I would also like to give fucking

massive flowers to Catherine Kina, who I think has been bringing just phenomenal consistency a character with warmth and genuine heart and who's not just cast a sober other flick but by the entire movie wholesale is just dismissed out of hand i think in a different movie perhaps with more breathing room for us we would have seen the fallout we would have seen some other character detail from her experience like this is so fleck focused yeah that we don't have any idea of how but And it's probably to the credit of the performance that, you know,

we don't have to watch their character become worse by seeing them reckoning with this in the world of the movie. I know, but what a thing after seven watches, that we are thirsty for what we've found a little something in the film to go. I could have more of that. I'm full. I am so full. I've eaten so much Joker too.

Well, Tim, can I just say today specifically, I hope you left room for dessert because you've got no idea what we're having but it is Joker 2 there's a line that Mary Ann the character says which is I know what it's like to fall in love when she's trying to sort of console

Arthur to come back to reality and adopt a more sound legal strategy than putting faceplane on and making fun of a little person and that's a bit for me where I'm like cool now let us so hey camera A can we all right so stay on here and now we're going to walk out of the courtroom with her do you know what I would love we're going to get in her car if she was in a relationship with the station controller who had a bad day at work and was like I had a bad day at work and he's like don't even get me started

you know this is and this is fucking look at us go man this is us we have found we have found a cogent story detail untold in the movie yeah that is accessible to us a place that we can go oh this is like our memory palace but for safety it's our safety palace is our mountain yeah we have if i could borrow a phrase from the movie built a mountain from a little hill yeah we have it's a nice mountain man that is that is a nice thought let me see what other incredibly coherent uh things i wrote down in my notebook love to hear them i mean you did say we're going to well i said we were going to talk about steve kugin and lady gaga's performance we've gotten a bit into you want to talk gaga i just probably very similar

commentary to what we've seen now to Steve Coogan the last three watches, it's like, I don't know if you are the phenomenal actor that I thought you were at the start. I'm questioning everything. Can I ask? But mainly I'm questioning Lady Gaga's acting choices. Can I ask without leading the witness or, you know, just, I'm just trying to do my duty as a, you know, co-host. I'll allow it. And film critic. go well if you're listening you would have probably thought

that they were the same person the character that Tim just did I'd like to wait actually I don't know was that two characters and then they were doing an aside after a statement was it one character

doing an aside or was it two characters I sort of split the deaf on it yeah yeah anyway it's a lovely detail I just want to know whether or not that is all on Lady Gaga's performance or you are maybe holding less space and tolerance for the character of Harley Quinn.

So it's not just the performance you're tired of. No, I think what you just said is projection. Yeah. I think that might be the case as well. Yeah. Yeah, you just asked me if this is about my thoughts on Harley. I don't think so, Chief. But I know that you've got some thoughts on Harley.

Well, it just means that we are sharing this experience, but we're all, you know, there's inside of it there's still the room for us to have different forming opinions. Absolutely. It does feel like a horror, like a body horror, sci-fi thing where we're like two, like there was two guys that get absorbed by the blob

and you can still make out like the different limbs of the different people that comprise the blob, but now everyone is part of the blob and just you and I are the only two in the blob. And people like, so how does it work when you have an idea? Do you both have the idea? Exactly. Or is it one person's idea? Yeah.

The answer is. while it sounds cute again it is horrifying but it's the answer is both because sometimes it is our idea and so but yeah i am finding and i did sort of bring it up before i couldn't get it out in the last episode and god knows how i meant to be more coherent now than i was recently but i just find the character who you know and actually it's challenge so i'd like to just open the tab of saying who caused the explosion that this this meandering tangent will arrive at which is My interpretation of the character of Harley Quinn in the previous three or so screenings

is just, you know, someone with absolutely no skin in the game who risks nothing, who has access to money and security, who checks herself into a mental facility, lies about some incredibly, like, to Arthur, a vulnerable person with her additional agency and mental faculty,

like heavily manipulates him by saying I am like you I burn my parents' house down my dad died in a car crash I am here outside of my own free will and then again continues

so starts of fire of which he bears the consequence of being put in solitary confinement she ultimately has you know as a voluntary patient can basically still leave whenever she wants she then comes back so she does leave

or she has sex with him like he tries to make a bit of him puts the makeup on him as the joker to have sex with him leaves comes back it's like they made me leave because you are a bad influence this continues like next time she sees him as in the courtroom

she's like you need to fire your lawyer he fires her lawyer he she then she's you need the lawyer sorry the lawyer tells Arthur that she is

manipulating him yes he goes to her to Quinn she goes to Harley Quinn and says my lawyer says this you are manipulating me

she says did you did you check yourself in is your dad a doctor you're playing me for a full and she says people tell lies I did it to make you like me

I yeah I like you know I did all of this to make you like me so don't worry about any of that also I've moved into your apartment yes and I'm pregnant which is you know

you would assume as a significant story beat is not you know it's not it's not us ignoring it it is the movie ignoring the fact that that is not relevant at all basically jeez him up fire your lawyer okay he fires the lawyer she keeps being like you got to

you know you got to do more of the makeup stuff in court you've really got her you are joker you can do anything he does all of this okay he puts he mounts his most powerful performance stroke most insane defense in full joker character she gets arched up

we experience a wedding fantasy on behalf of Arthur Fleck that night he goes back the guards are like man we don't like the way he took shit on TV you caught us stupid and fat we are going to give you basically and this is what we understand to happen

a baton up the ass he has a terrible night's sleep he overhears them killing his friend in the facility Ricky who's previously called Jimmy or Billy basically the two consonant why he goes back he gets the makeup on and it's like all you want really if you are

following the story and you are rooting for arthur flick you are just like dig in brother one more gig but he is absolutely fucking rinsed out by all of this that has happened and he's like he's there and he goes i can't hack it man i'm just a fucking weird guy and i killed people and i wish i didn't but I did and after all of this like all of this unbelievable hard work to you know to get him to this place when he can't give her exactly what she wants she's like I'm out okay she walks out of the courtroom she walks out of the courtroom he's presumably crestfallen he is crestfallen calls her up at his apartment she doesn't answer whatever sings into the phone he sings into the phone yeah He then, like, goes, so the next day when he's being sentenced, there's an explosion.

And I have, I think we both have understood that this explosion is caught. It's not credited to anyone, but I think due to maybe mishearing or not hearing the entirety of some slightly, like, offline dialogue, which is also expositional, the two Joker imitators who find him and pick him up in their car, and a oner, which we haven't talked about. like in what is quite a staggering piece of filmmaking something we've earmarked as what would be a good start to the movie is all of this scene it's a one shot get him in the car and they're saying holy shit you did it man you said you wanted to blow it up i've always understood that to be that they are taking credit for blowing it up in this last screening they said you said you wanted to blow it up and someone did so they're giving credit to him for stating it not necessarily taking responsibility for doing it we are not to know who did

it. But all the screenings until this one, I've understood that they did it. It's sort of not important, but in my reading of Harley, I think it's relevant. So he gets out of the car, he runs to where his apartment is, up the stairs. The stairs, which he made famous in the first movie, and she talks about living here and going up and down every day to school, which is completely fabricated. There's another one of her life. That's right. And he's like, all right. I'm free. We're out of here. Let's go. He doesn't ask about his unborn child. Actually, he does.

Does he? Yeah. What does he say? Oh, wait, maybe it's in a different earlier... He just says, he says, what about the baby, I think? Oh, wow. And I think it is in that extra. Really?

Really quietly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, I believe that. I believed it. anyway she's like peace i'm out she says and she says she says all we had was the fantasy yeah you ruined it and she says and she sings that's entertainment and so like all i'm saying is watching this stack up on itself over multiple screenings

I'm starting to think that she might not be all she's cracked up to be. Holy shit, man. I'm not sure that she's such a great match for this guy. I hear what you're saying. Yeah, you've really laid out all the clues. And so, I suppose, in service of, you know, my projection onto your opinion that Lady Garg

might not be a good actor. That might be true. Maybe she's, you know, like us, struggling through the difficult middle years of our relationship with the movie. But also maybe you're sick of spending time with someone who's not that nice. Yeah.

You mean from Arthur's perspective or ours? From ours. From an actor. From Lady Gaga's acting perspective. It's like maybe she's not acting that well. Also, maybe you're sick and tired of spending time with who she's been. Yeah, that's true.

true even the best roast chicken every night of the week it's no roast chicken at all well let's talk about that it is what there is a saying about that well i think i've bought the same before and i don't know if it's a a genuine idiom and i've never looked this up that people i know or if jono just came up with it but if you feast every day then when will you feast yeah i love it I think about it often as well And I genuinely don't know If it's like a non-sequitur parading As an idiom

Oh It's got such fantastic Embued meaning Yeah Maybe just from the way you've used it Anyhow But it's a good useful one And it is apropos

It's too much You've stuffed yourself silly You know I'm full I've got a guts full of Joker 2 Yeah I'm backed up With Joker 2 Yeah look man

I don't never like i i i don't have i don't there's not much i can say to you because it's like the only thing on the menu is more joker too like it's just if there's a degustation yeah you know you've had seven tiny helpings of joker too and you and you honestly you're so naive of the ways of the world you you're looking i'm already getting pretty full and this digastation is going on a bit and you let your eyes flick down to the menu to see what dish they could possibly follow I'm joker too with and in your heart of hearts you are thinking there is

a possibility that it could be anything different perhaps even a different font but you look down and print it in exactly the same font you'll see that the eighth course that is being served at this restaurant that we call the worst idea of all time yeah Joker 2 is Joker 2

is same font yeah fuck me it's Joker 2 Joker 2 Joker 2 that's a brutal reality now I've written down here, Tim. Have you got John Bon Jovi? Tell me everything you know about

John Bon Jovi. Not a lot. It's got a son who married Millie Bobby Brown. Really? He... It's tangentially about John Bon Jovi. He is the father-in-law to

Millie Bobby Brown. Not much. I mean, I know that naming your band Bon Jovi and just dropping your first name to be your band's name is a fucking sick power play. No one's getting confused on the songwriting credits. You know, when it comes to divving up all the pennies when you named the band after yourself. Who do you think a court's going to believe, guy? Fucking Noel Simmons, the drummer of Bon Jovi or John Bon Jovi of Bon Jovi? All that to say, we're halfway there.

Thumbs for you? Yeah. I'm going to go, I don't know. Something about the way we're talking about this movie is telling me that while it might have felt like a one thumb down experience, upon reflection, maybe there was a no thumbs watch. I completely agree. It was a no thumbs.

thumbs watch because if it was this is how we're dealing with it the movie is zero this is how we will deal with it honestly it feels like damage points it's like what we were saying before about the movie washing over us and it being like the ocean like what do you think you're going to do beat up the ocean all you're going to do is tucker yourself out so It was zero thumbs. It wasn't minus one thumb or minus two thumbs. Because in some fucked up way, Todd Phillips is one,

if that's the case as well. I want to deny him everything. You know, Todd Phillips is still at large. I don't give a shit. Based on my experience of his film just then, it's no thumbs with all the venom in the world. It's a poisoned zero.

Shining light? Don't mind if I do. I think I wrote two down, if you can believe it. Absolutely. Lady Gaga lighting up a cigarette to say I'm pregnant. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty cool. Mine is during the Sunny and Shear Bejee's moment.

Yes. When they start singing, you don't know what it's like. And Gaga says, there's a lie. and then it's Joaquin's performance as Joker of a certain kind of lying it's specific

and other people might know what you're talking about but I know precisely what you're talking about how could you not know what I'm talking about I'm happy to park it there I think we need to get our punch cards and clock out for the day I believe that's the work for this part

of our lives to call it the day is like honestly confusing to me so you just have to be a metaphorical workday but in this metaphor there are two work days

per workday yeah and well in this metaphor you punch out and you open the door to the exit but it's just an exact replica of the factory you just punched out of

it is which is exactly how god dammit what's that Apple TV show called not Ted Lasso.

No, not redundancy. Severance. I've not seen it. That is, you are described, this is severance. This is severance. You open the door to escape the office. Literally this is severance and you're back in the office.

Oh really? You're just like terrified and angry and confused and you don't know how it's happened. Oh my God. Dude, this is, I've not seen that. I didn't realize that what, dude. Wow, psychological experience is actually. I was going to fucking end the, but we're going to talk a little bit about this. So in Severance, there are a set of people who have decided that instead of dealing with the pain of their lives,

they will get a computer chip surgically implanted into their brain to join a company where they separate basically two distinct consciousnesses in their head. The one that lives at work, and then when you get in the elevator to leave for the day, your memory is white. and you click back into non-work version. It's us. We made a decision to fucking break our brains and probably ultimately to the benefit of some corporation

in ways we can't even understand. Maybe we're just helping the movie. I don't know. Do you think this is a... Do you think this is a ringing endorsement of the movie? I would say not. I would say it's a poorly articulated cautionary tale about thinking about seeing this movie. Well, because this movie is about the separation of identity as well.

So Severance is... Severance is Good Joker, too. Yeah. And we're trapped in between them. Yeah. Well, no, we were the worst one. Oh, yeah, well, yeah. I mean, if I'd just take a glance back at the degustation menu, it does say Joker 2 coming up.

Jesus, fuck, fuck, holy moly. That's all right. We just did this as well. We just did this. We watched the movie and we did our little review and then we just fucking just went straight back in, straight in. Yeah. I like, I haven't eaten anything in ages. Yeah, yeah, neither.

that's not good oh come on i'm full of joker 2 and there's no food and there's no there's no nutritional value in joker 2 none we've got to end yeah yeah that's enough of that um but do tune in next week to find out what movie we'll be watching for the podcast the worst idea of all time things in life are free. This idea of old time. That was idea of old time. A brand new way to reach your mind. What's the word is idea of all time?

Oh, ee!