The Confounding Conundrum of the Condiment King!

Batman's silliest villain has a surprisingly interesting story.

Of all the throwaway side characters in "The Lego Batman Movie," he was A One to remember.

The Condiment King makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance--complete with ketchup and mustard guns that make a loud "splurt" sound--in "The Lego Batman Movie," as one of the Joker's minions.

It's a funny moment on its own, and it's even funnier for the Batman fans who know that this pest-o is an actual villain from the DC canon. At the time, I remember thinking it was a rare joke-on-a-joke that worked.

But the Condiment King is no mere joke-on-a-joke. The "Sultan of Sauce" is more like jokes cubed on jokes cubed, an intricate and seemingly infinite Russian nesting doll of knowing, self-referential winks, each layer gently elbowing those before and after it.

And when the jokes are all put together, the story of the "Prince of Pickles" forms an arc with an unexpected (and likely unintentional) air of tragedy--which is maybe the greatest joke of them all.

It turns out the Condiment King explains quite a bit about Gotham.

His appearance in "Lego Batman Movie" comes in the intro, as the Lego Joker explains his latest plan to capture all of Gotham to a captive airplane pilot. Listing his gang, he begins with the well-known adversaries such as Catwoman and Mr. Freeze, but finishes on a rapid-fire succession of some of the Dark Knight's most obscure villains--Crazy Quilt, the Eraser, Clock King, Gentleman Ghost, Zebra Man, Orca, Polka-Dot Man. And then finally, the Condiment King.

"OK, are you making some of those up?" asks the befuddled pilot.

"Nope, they're all real. Probably worth a Google," the Lego Joker replies.

It's a funny little quip on the ridiculousness of some of Batman's foes, created by writers under intense pressure to produce copy on deadline during some of the weirder years of comics. But then you have the added layer of irony--the Condiment King is not one of the crazy 50's Silver Age villains, but a shtick devised by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm in 1994 for the beloved "Batman: The Animated Series." (It just occurred to me that recruiting these particular villains was probably the Lego Joker's idea of a joke too, adding yet another dimension of jokiness to this.)

Batman writers often will dig into the Dark Knight's almost impossibly diverse history to find interesting nuggets for a modern-day spin. Grant Morrison and Tom King wrote darker and sometimes horrifying takes on Silver Age staples such as Bat-Mite, the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh and Kite Man.

But, as King noted, these characters--no matter how absurd they seem today--were written with utter sincerity at the time. And while modern writers will sometimes pull them up from obscurity for a quick moment of levity, the best try to match that conviction when updating them to the modern canon. (E.g., King's tragic backstory to Kite Man.)

By contrast, the Condiment King was never meant to be anything but a joke.

In the TAS episode "Make 'Em Laugh," he is Buddy Standler, a stand-up comedian, who goes on a short-lived sprint of supervillainy while under mind control from the Joker. The Clown Prince of Crime was exacting revenge on Standler and two others, who kicked the Joker off the stage of a "Laugh-Off" televised comedian competition, of which they were acting as judges. (The other victims are Harry Loomis or the "Pack Rat," and Lisa Lorraine or "Mighty Mom," the latter clearly based on Roseanne Barr.)

The Condiment King wears a pickle-like helmet and fires off streams of ketchup and mustard from guns hooked to pressurized tanks on his back. While constumed superheroes and villains are infamous for wearing shorts that look like underpants, the Condiment King appears to be wearing actual white briefs over his tights.

His attempt to hold up a fancy Gotham restaurant ends quickly, thanks to Batman. ("The big bad Bat-guy. I knew you'd catch-up to me sooner or later. How I relished this meeting.")

Dini and Timm were clearly riffing on the over-the-top villains from Adam West's Batman show, which was itself a sly self-parody--as the sci-fi earnestness of the 50's spilled over into ironic absurdity for the iconoclastic 60's.

But within the reality of the episode itself, it's also the Joker's joke on Gotham's over-saturation with supervillains, a fiendishly clever way to humiliate and destroy the poor souls who crossed his path.

So, Condiment King was a joke on a joke on a joke the second he was created.

But while the Condiment King was Dini and Timm's brainchild, he owes his transliteration into the official comics canon to one of DC's greatest monster-makers, Chuck Dixon--the co-creator of Bane. And Dixon may be the true reason why Condiment King became a thing.

Dixon in 2002 introduced the character, now named Mitchell Mayo, in Birds of Prey #37, first in a flashback before the heroes meet the present-day version.

It turns out, Condiment King began as a kid working at a mall fast-food joint, who apparently lost it--as Oracle puts it, he "took one too many special orders." He doesn't have guns this time, just ketchup and mustard bottles, which he uses to squirt at his victims. He was subdued by Robin and Batgirl, who ended up having their first kiss later that night.

Dixon revisited the story a year later in "Batgirl: Year One"--this time, the Condiment King "held up" a subway station, while wearing a backwards hat and cape, and with his nom de plume scrawled across his fast-food uniform. And while he claims to be sporting Dijon, it looks more like the nameless ooze you find at the center of your table at a BW3's.

Batgirl and Robin quickly defeated him while on their way to catch another villain--sort of their equivalent of a romantic first date.

It's a clever riff on the Batman: TAS episode from Dixon, but it's also a deft little piece of Gotham world-building.

After all, what do you do if you're just a normal crazy person in a city filled with psychotic and megalomaniacal supervillains? How do you get anyone's attention? Dixon seems to be noting that Gotham would have a hierarchy of masked crazies, from the truly deranged and brilliant sociopaths like the Joker to your typical yahoos on the subway who instinctively copy the big boys.

This guy isn't a supervillain at all--he's clearly a poor soul who needs help. His crime spree, if it can even be called that, resulted in little more than a public disruption and some shirt stains.

But everything changed when he went to Arkham Asylum.

When Robin (now Tim Drake), Black Canary and Blue Beetle catch up with him following a Joker-orchestrated Arkham break-out, they expected an easy pushover. But instead they found him hopped up on Joker gas, armed with pressurized cannons and with a victim chained to a "mustard gas bomb" about to obliterate his former mall work-space.

A side note: It's a bit of a misconception that the Condiment King is harmless. At his original debut on TAS, his mustard and ketchup guns were strong enough to knock a man across a room and subdue several others. And in his DC comics debut, his cannons were armed not with ordinary sandwich spread, but specially engineered sauces at the top of the spiciness Scovill scale (yep, it's a real thing). Robin and Black Canary nearly pass out from the deluge, before Blue Beetle gets ahold of some milk.

It's unclear how reliable a narrator the King is--(he's under the influence of Joker venom, remember)--but he describes how Arkham transformed him from a mere mall/subway weirdo into something closer to a true villain. (I'm not sure how squirting mustard at passersby was enough to get him involuntarily committed for an extended period of time--the laws on criminal insanity in Gotham have always been a little hinky.)

We learn that Mayo does indeed have an obsession with spices and flavors, and he found the prison meals to be close to torture. He claims the food was not only bland but drugged--we have no way of knowing whether this is true, but a warden in his flashback seems to be watching it closely. A fellow inmate, Dr. Pamela Isley--a.k.a. Poison Ivy--taught Mayo about "peppers, grasses, roots and radishes," and the misguided Arkham therapists let him work in the kitchen, honing in on his craft.

I'm not sure how much Joker's venom gas has to do with his attack on the mall--at one point Robin says he doesn't even know his own name. But what is clear is that Arkham provided little help to this fledgling madman.

Again, it's all Dixon's clever play on the original Condiment King story, including the Joker's role as his conductor. But it got the King's ticket punched as an official Gotham bad guy, no matter how preposterous. (Years later, in another Dixon story, Robin subdues him trying to set off a "Scoville bomb" in check cashing store, and complains that authorities keep letting him go because they don't take him seriously. "Sure, he seems like a joke. Until he blinds someone or sends them into anaphylactic shock.")

Becoming one of the DC writers' go-to characters when they needed a ridiculous villain has landed the Condiment King in some pretty scary spots.

In the 2009 Final Crisis: Aftermath series, written by Freddie Williams II and Lilah Sturges, he is among the Gotham low-lifes--including Polka-Dot Man and Sportsmaster--who fall in with Gen. Immortus, a skeletal ancient megalomaniac offering a "refuge for the obsolete"--for the "misfit, misbegotten." Immortus aims to build an "Army of the Endangered" out of second-rate bad guys, enhancing some of them through surgery. This plan goes awry when the Human Flame, cybernetically enhanced, overcomes his controls and attacks Condiment King, cutting off his nose and beating him to a pulp with his own ketchup bottles.

The King quickly dropped the condiment puns and begins begging for his life.

Tom King imagined how Kite Man would be regarded as a joke by everyone but himself. But Condiment King's plight seems even more cruel--literally drawn into the world as a joke, subdued by superhero vigilantes on autopilot, seduced and corrupted by a counterproductive mental health system and imbued with delusions of grandeur before Gotham's bone-crushing reality hit him in the face.

The Condiment King was lead astray not just by Gotham's wickedness, but by cosmic forces of layered satire he could not possibly hope to understand or overcome.

But all is not lost for the King. While F. Scott Fitzgerald may have said there are no second acts in America, he (sadly) never wrote for DC.

After yet another tussle with Batman which landed him in Arkham, the Condiment King (with his nose back--there've been two universe-wide reboots since then) more recently acted as a henchman for the Penguin in a bid to expand his operations to New York City, in Frank Tieri's Harley Quinn series "Angry Bird." The King ultimately gave up his life of crime and achieved what one would presume to be his life-long dream--to run a popular hot dog stand on Coney Island. He kept his outfit, of course.

So maybe even the universe's private jokes have a chance in life. They just have to get the hell out of Gotham.