Beaks & Ballots: The Penguin, Politics, and Populism

The Penguin as portrayed by Burgess Meredith in the original Batman TV Show (20th Century Fox Television, Greenway Productions)

Donald Trump claims that in 2020, he was up against everyone—the media, the courts, even the vote-counters.

The Penguin would tell him to go cry a river (and swim down it).

When he ran for Gotham’s mayor in 1966—with his old foe, Batman, as his main opponent—he was opposed not only by the incumbent mayor but the entire Gotham Police Department, whose officers all proudly wore Batman campaign buttons.

In the classic Batman TV episode “Hizzoner the Penguin”—that’s “His Honor,” if you’re not familiar with early 20th century political lingo—and the follow-up, “Dizzoner the Penguin,” the villain nearly won the mayorship with a lively and ruthless campaign that would put Corey Lewandowski to shame.

And just like Trump, who we almost certainly will see again, it wouldn’t be Penguin’s last foray into politics. The dapper birder and jewel thief gained a taste for politics, going back to the campaign trail in 1992’s “Batman Returns” and later comics. While never as successful as Lex Luthor, who took the presidency in the 90s, Penguin is Gotham’s closest thing to a Trump-like figure, with no lines separating his political ambitions, his business enterprises and his illicit underworld empire.

But it was the 1966 episode that introduced the Penguin to politics. It’s still a blast to watch today, mixing the series’ madcap camp with an edge of political satire. It’s also a fascinating cultural artifact from a time of rising anxiety about how television was upending American democracy, reflecting fears that have become so baked-in to our political discourse you sometimes need a reminder that they once seemed new.

Gotham was never the same after Penguin gained an interest in politics. Neither was politics, for that matter.

Vote For Pengy!

In the two-episode arc, the villain—played by the legendary Burgess Meredith, whose Penguin really is a masterwork of malicious comic joy—blazes a trail to the mayor’s office through shameless lying and showmanship. Convinced that the incumbent mayor doesn’t stand a chance, the terrified police convince Batman to run in his place.

But, in keeping with Adam West’s deadpan interpretation of the Dork Knight, Batman runs a dreary, Al Gore-ish campaign, losing votes by refusing to kiss babies and boring Gothamites to death with solemn lectures about “the issues.” The Penguin, unencumbered with such scruples, seduces voters with wild campaign events featuring belly dancers, music from the real Paul Revere and the Raiders, and champagne. (With the last, he’s engaging in a longstanding American tradition, by the way.)

Penguin carpet-bombs Gotham with posters and buttons, and uses the alliterative slogan “Pengy: The People’s Pick” and a campaign song to achieve maximum exposure. But he also avoids making any real promises, other than to get rid of Batman.

“We’ll give the voters of this city the kind of campaign that they want. Plenty of girls and bands and slogans and lots of hoopla,” Penguin yells at a rally. “But remember—no politics! Issues confuse people. A big smile, a hearty handshake, a catchy campaign song. That’s the way to win an election!”

The Penguin as portrayed by Burgess Meredith in the original Batman TV Show (20th Century Fox Television, Greenway Productions)

Batman finds such tactics distasteful, but is also sanguine about their effectiveness.

“I’m convinced the American electorate is too mature to be taken in by cheap vaudeville trickery,” he tells Robin. “After all, if our national leaders were elected on the basis of tricky slogans, brass bands and pretty girls, our country would be in a terrible mess, wouldn’t it?”

Of course, the Penguin ultimately loses, but it feels like an awfully close call.

Voters and the Idiot Box

At the time, this business about slogans, jingles, music and tricks would have been an obvious play on the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections, which pitted Dwight Eisenhower against Adlai Stevenson and were among the first where television played a major role.

While the charismatic, professorial Stevenson famously disdained TV, Eisenhower’s advisors worked around their candidate’s awkwardness at the stump with a groundbreaking new technique–the 30-second political TV ad, including his ear bug of a campaign jingle, “I Like Ike.” Stevenson accused the Republicans of “merchandizing the presidency” by selling it “like cereal.”

It was a time when the political classes were doing a lot of handwringing about what the boob tube was doing to democracy.

In 1952 Richard Nixon, then the GOP vice presidential nominee, staved off political annihilation with his infamous and cynical “Checkers” TV special, which shocked his opponents by its effectiveness. But just a few years later, his luck with the unforgiving TV screen would change. Nixon’s sweaty uneasiness against JFK’s rock-star aura in a televised debate may have cost him the 1960 election, and certainly changed conceptions of what a political leader should look like. (As the story goes, those listening in on radio thought Nixon had won.)

In the Batman episode, there’s a very clever gag where goons take over the Gotham City Convention Hall during a jeweler’s convention, and both candidates charge in to protect the precious stones. TV commentators keep score of how many crooks each has nabbed with tallies on a white chalkboard—a parody of televised political conventions, which became the norm in 1952 and were criticized for further trivializing the process. (Since Penguin staged the heist in the first place, he easily wins.)

Stanford Sherman, writer for the episodes, may have also been thinking of the 1966 California gubernatorial race, which played out while he was finishing the scripts. The first episode aired a week before election day–when charming actor Ronald Reagan would defeat Democratic incumbent Pat Brown, a world-changing result Sherman was none too pleased with.

Calling Reagan “the man with the smile so broad it knots behind his head,” and one who the “mossbacks” (think MAGA-heads) need to upend the party, Sherman lamented the result in letters to his girlfriend.

“I may move to Tahiti,” he wrote.

The 1966 race is also seen as a pivotal one for TV’s increased importance in elections, and not only because it elevated one of the most telegenic politicians in history, who would put a friendly sheen on the right-wing Goldwater politics that had terrified the nations only two years earlier. Constant TV coverage of violent unrest in Berkeley and elsewhere fueled a backlash to leftist politics in the state and sharpened Reagan’s pitch for a return to traditional values.

Legacy of the Cobblepots

In theory, it could have been any member of Batman’s rogue’s gallery usurping the world of politics–but there’s some history with why it would be Penguin. He debuted in 1941, created either by Bob Kane, based on the Kool cigarette mascot, or by Bill Finger, based on emperor penguins, depending on whom you asked. Either way, he was clearly meant to mock bow-tied aristocrats, yet another hint of class politics in the early Batman comics. But while the villain, named Oswald Cobblepot, may be a blue-blood—later world-building established that he comes from one of Gotham’s most prominent families—he has always also been an outsider due to his strange appearance.

“Ha ha, he does look like a Penguin,” Wayne says when he first lays eyes on him in Detective Comics #58, where the villain is described as a “strange, almost ludicrous figure.” More recent Penguin comics, such as Penguin: Pain and Prejudice, elaborate on his painful childhood as a hated outcast.

Most of his early crimes involve complex heists of valuables from the Gotham elite, often using a legit business venture as a front. Despite his heritage, he’s an outsider to proper society, a threat to the status quo and the elite’s property, just like every other Batman villain. After all, rich people have the cool things—gold, diamonds, Van Goghs—you’d want to steal. It’s a basic conservatism that’s mixed in with the populism of the early comics, inherited all the way back from the Scarlet Pimpernel—a masked aristocrat protecting other aristocrats from the unruly mob during the French Revolution.

Seen through this lens, you start to understand why Penguin so desperately wants the mayorship. The pariah is using bare-knuckled mass politics to gain the entrance to high society he ought to have by birthright, but cannot and will not achieve due to his very nature.

Again, does this remind you of anyone?

Television left the political machines of the early 20th century in smoldering ruins, but who or what would replace them? Who would protect voters from their worst impulses, now that so many filters had been removed? Just what forces—big money, manipulative advertising, or sheer demagoguery—has TV handed the keys to democracy?

To say these anxieties have not abated is an understatement. But it’s sometimes jarring to remember they were once fresh.

A Politician’s Return

This basic class resentment always sticks with the Penguin, and is why he hasn’t stayed away from the ballot box.

After Meredith, Penguin got his turn in a starring role in Tim Burton’s 1992 “Batman Returns,” the sequel to the 1989 blockbuster “Batman.”

Just as he did with the rest of the Batman universe, Burton reinterpreted Penguin through his own baroque, peculiar sensibility and gave him a brutal sense of tragedy. Played by Danny DeVito as a psychotic, aggrieved and literally cold-blooded mutant avian monster, he’s irredeemable—but you can still sense Burton’s basic sympathy for this Gotham leper.

Burton had a hard time figuring out what to do with this character, however. After several rewrites he turned to Daniel Waters, the screenwriter of “Heathers,” who decided to return to the mayoral plot from “Hizzoner” and added a political element to the movie. (Though Waters has said he didn’t even know about the 1960s episodes, and the Penguin was mandated as the villain by Warner Brothers.)

Thinking of the recent L.A. riots, Waters imagined a politician instigating violence and then running on promises to stamp it out. In the movie, the Penguin controls a gang of misfit criminals, who he directs to sow chaos to paint the incumbent mayor as helpless. And Waters also created a whole new character, Max Shreck, a scheming, vampiric city power broker who uses Penguin’s sympathetic tale of estrangement to elevate him to the mayorship for his own sordid ends. (Also a bit Trump-like, Waters has noted in interviews, although maybe more Fred than Donald.)

“I wanted to show that the true villains of our world don’t necessarily wear costumes,” he said.

While “Batman” shifted the focus a bit from street crooks to the crime bosses in boardrooms, its worldview is still basically cops vs. robbers. “Batman Returns” expanded it further to include the very power structure of Gotham itself, putting Batman in the awkward position of a vigilante and a city tycoon himself. The easy moral structure of the early superhero universe was breaking down.

Changing Gotham

The comics followed suit. In “Penguin Triumphant,” released alongside the movie, the villain considers going straight while settling old scores with his would-be fellow elitists. (“Boy, I bet Donald Trump is shaking in his boots,” Robin mutters.) A few years later, Detective Comics #683 introduced the Iceberg Lounge, Penguin’s nightclub and base of operations. He became less of a crime kingpin and more of an information and power broker, sometimes even entering into uneasy, transactional alliances with Batman. Maybe, unable to change himself enough to join Gotham’s highest social strata, he found a way to pull it down to his level.

It was a while before he returned to the campaign stump, but it became a recurring part of the character. In the popular 2012 alternative universe Caped Crusader origin story “Batman: Earth One,” Cobblepot is the mayor even before Bruce Wayne begins his quest.

The rest of Gotham changed a lot alongside Penguin during this period, as well.

Frank Miller’s earth-shattering “Batman: Year One” rebuilt the Dark Knight as a noir figure in a realistic, crime-filled Gotham. Aside from a young Selina Kyle, transitioning from life as a dominatrix to Catwoman, there’s not a masked villain in sight. Like all noir protagonists, in a sense, young Bruce Wayne’s enemy is his environment itself—streets filled with violence and the corrupt system that sanctions and organizes it. Batman is going to war with the city he wants to save. The dynamic of the early comics was flipped on its head—now Batman was the threat to the status quo.

“Ladies. Gentlemen. You have eaten well. You have eaten Gotham’s wealth. Its spirit,” Batman says as he crashes a dinner at the mayor’s mansion. “Your feast is nearly over. From this moment on—none of you are safe.”

Jeph Loeb, in his equally iconic “The Long Halloween,” pulls on this thread a little further, depicting an old guard of power brokers and organized crime bosses taken down not only by Batman, but by a new vanguard of masked madmen and megalomaniacs—the “freaks”—that filled the void created by the Dark Knight’s disruption of the social order.

Gotham turned into a shifting, living, evolving world without sturdy moral framework, molded by an assortment of actors all trying to impose their will onto the city—including Batman. And, in a weird way, you can trace it back to two TV episodes in the late 60s, observing another turbulent phase in social upheaval.

Today, in an age where everyone’s hopping mad about the status quo—but no one can seem to agree on who or what that is—it’s no wonder that even the capes and masks in our escapist entertainment no longer provide the moral certitude they once did.