Analysis of the Joker

Right, as if such a thing were possible. My primary purpose for this conversation is to see how individuals interpret The Joker. What do you think makes him tick, why he does the things that he does, etc. This isn't specific to any particular comic continuity, and I'd rather not get too overtly specific regarding things like "well in this issue it's said that," because According To The Writer factors in so heavily in regards to the Joker that it's almost impossible to know what's right and what's upside-down pineapple cake.

To get this started, my own personal take on the man, the myth, the madness, is that he's all about the punchline. Everything he does is an attempt to tell the same joke to various audiences, just to see if anyone gets it.

The Joke is that for all your accomplishments and all your legacy, you're going to end up as worm food. Kings and paupers are equal in that one regard. Death is the ultimate cosmic Punchline to the Joke of Life. In this interpretation he's The Unfettered as applied to the philosophy of the Straw Nihilist. Instead of brooding and moping, he's just going around telling the Joke, because to him, it's funny.

This, to me, explains why he has a fascination with Batman. Batman's entire shtick is to interrupt the Joke in the middle of its telling. He's a Heckler, but an ineffectual one. The Joker keeps bugging him because it's fun to remind Bat-brain that he can't stop the Punchline. It happens to everyone.

In short, I think he's crazy, but in a very specific way that causes him to view other people as "props" almost; only there to help him tell the Joke.

Funny enough, my interpretation means that there are certain actions that are just not funny even to him. The Joke he tells has to be applicable regardless of who the target is, otherwise it's not the same joke.

And that's why he refused to team up with the Red Skull.

Anyone else care to give it a shot?

I agree with you, for the most part. But, I think the Joker's "Punchline" goes beyond just death. His punchline is about placing a "good" or "bad", "right" or "wrong" value on almost anything. In addition to death being inevitable, life is chaos and trying to sort that randomness into "good" and "bad" is functionally stupid.

The one kink in his armor, though, is that his ego believes that he's the best person at understanding and delivering this joke. He tends to lash out at people who try to upstage him, or step outside his bounds, or undermine his "genius". Yeah, he's all about people getting the Punchline, but it has to be him that told the joke.

I can agree with that. It fits with my supposition that he views most everyone else as "props" instead of fellow comedians. Props don't tell jokes. They're used to tell the joke.

Nice analogy!

For me, the big sticking point on the Joker is his insanity or, more precisely, lack thereof. There is a tendency in storytelling to misapply the word "insane" to villains who, quite frequently, display few if any characteristics of true clinical insanity. The Joker is foremost on this list, in my opinion, rarely if ever coming off like someone who is not in complete control of his choices. He makes terrible choices, but being an awful human being is not, itself, a mental disorder.

A lot of fuss is made about the Joker's undiagnosable, incurable disease, that no psychiatrist can cure him, no medication can fix him, no treatment can restore him to whatever he should be. Why is he incurable? Because he's not ill. His "madness" is a philosophy, not a disease. His behavior is the deliberate acts of a man who looked at society's expectations of what he should be and said, "No, I'm going to define who I am, and if I get bored with definition, then I'll redefine it."

The Joker can't be cured because, despite his presentation, the Joker is not sick. He's just a dipshit.

One of the things that really sealed the deal for me on what the Joker does and why he focuses on Batman so much, is how he was ultimately and finally defeated in Batman Beyond. He's like a perpetually insecure comedian who wants the audience to laugh at his jokes, but is utterly terrified should they start laughing at him, or if another performer gets better billing. His obsession with Batman is easy enough to explain - the Cowl tries too hard to remain cold and distant, so it's like a creepier antagonistic version of Beast Boy trying to make Raven smile.

It also ties up to his Multiple-Choice Past - as soon as he's pinned down to one history, one motive, he risks being ridiculed over it. As a fittingly common trait with the Bat, he has no sense of self-irony; no way to bounce back after his identity is made public. His claims to insanity would themselves be revealed to be as lame as those of your average keyboard ninja diagnosing himself with the fashionable psychological syndrome of the week, hounding the one man who wouldn't call his bluff, since he himself is too obsessed with his own past.

edited 23rd Oct '14 12:49:56 PM by indiana404

The insane angle really needs to get dropped. Of course comic books in general need to get their heads around what insanity actually is. My girlfriend and I once tried drawing up a list of Arkham inmates who actually belonged there. It was short.

You mean Maxie Zeus? The only legitimately crazy one that I can think of?

There's a couple of them, actually:

Two-Face is one of the obvious ones. His issues may not match any real-life psychological disorder, but they do rob him of the ability to make his own moral choices. Some writers portray him as becoming catatonic when deprived of his coin, totally unable to make any decisions about anything.

Arnold Wesker is usually legitimately crazy as well. He actually thinks that Scarface is alive, and that if he doesn't follow his orders, the doll will kill him. That again gives him a lack of moral agency.

Finally, some, though not all, portrayals of Killer Croc edge towards the insane. While he's sometimes a Genius Bruiser in control of himself, and sometimes a Dumb Muscle thug, the increasingly common portrayal of him as a slavering animal who just wants to eat everything that comes across his path could leave him insane. If Croc is as atavistic as he appears, then holding him responsible for his actions might be pushing it.

Oh, yeah, Wesker. Wesker's a funny one, too, though. During Knightfall, he escapes Arkham without Scarface and made a new puppet named "Socko" out of his sock because he lacked all confidence in his own ability to retrieve Scarface.

Socko and Scarface totally drew guns on each other and shot each other at the end of the event.

But yeah, I don't think he's insane, just twisted. He's perfectly aware of the consequences of his actions, he just doesn't care. And he clearly doesn't have an obsession with the Joke because he resorts to robbery and blackmail in between.

I think the major reason he keeps getting labeled as insane is because no jury in Gotham wants to think that he's anything but.

Getting back to the original question of just what The Joker represents, I get very tired of people playing the "agent of chaos" angle. Leaving aside the fact that it makes him sound like a Get Smart villain, it's not really accurate. Chaos is not inherently bad, and The Joker is less representative of chaos, or even Chaotic Evil, than he is of the much more specific "randomized violence".

It makes sense thematically. Batman's parents got killed, not because they did anything to bring it on themselves, but because a mugger decided, right then and on the fly, to shoot them. The Joker, accordingly, dedicates himself to inflicting that same sort of violence on everybody he comes across, upending people's lives to make the point that you are not safe, and that something horrible could happen to you in any place, at any time, and that you have no control over it.

Mad Hatter's probably legally defensible as insane too, and - depending heavily on the writer - Harley might be as well (her oneshot series, for example, goes back and forth sometimes about it).

After reading Living Hell, and stuff like the oneshot where it turns out Harley - pre-insanity - analyzed Joker as being perfectly sane and in control of his actions (with the arguable implication that Joker knew this and, in part, may have driven her crazy in an attempt to discredit her), I mostly assume that the reason Joker and especially villains like Scarecrow or Poison Ivy who are just sadists with particular obsessions get "insanity" is because Gotham's legal system is famously shitty.

With that in mind, I can actually accept that: Gotham's system being corrupt is one of the things Bruce Wayne dedicates his life to changing (albeit, this being something he is better off changing as Bruce Wayne than as Batman - one of the reasons I don't entirely like versions of him that play his identity as Bruce full on as an flighty idiot).

As for his character, I've always seen Joker not being particularly invested in irony. One of the reasons why I don't like him played as a straight-up serial killer is because it kind of misses the point of it: for him, it's all about the gag. His crimes are outlandish and make no sense because it bedevils normal people who expect normal crimes to befall them, if any. He'll treat things as nothing (including lives) because of how highly they're prized: he's stolen valuable things and then treated them like trash before, just for the humor value. He'll kill you because he finds the irony of destroying a life so convinced of its safety to be hilarious - likewise, he'll let you live when you think he's going to kill you because he finds that funny as well.

That's why my favorite Joker is the one in the 70's and 80's (the one Batman The Animated Series' Joker is adapted from). He was at a more interesting place when his range was broader.

edited 25th Oct '14 11:37:58 AM by KnownUnknown

It depends. Several comics have portrayed Joker as being temporarily 'fixed' out of his insanity by outside factors, and then he invariably falls into a My God, What Have I Done? BSOD status. It also might bear mention exposition to the same chemicals that affected him drives anyone, even the likes of aliens and animals, just as deranged as him, which regardless of what we might think of it, still is more or less frequent canon. A few comics also have given him the honest belief he and Batman are the only two actual people in the world, but if the 'constant reinvention' theory holds any real water, that's probably not right half the time or more. A few other times his inner monologue mentions him hearing voices in his head, and during Grant Morrison's run, those voices actually fight each other for domination over his mind.

I don't think sequences like the 'transformation' fit seen in Morrison's Clown at Midnight story, which was fairly important and difficult to ignore as it shaped the character for years, can be truly attributed to a sane man just feigning insanity to escape the consequences of his actions.

If we're taking the runs of Harley Quinn where she has 'Harley Vision' (that is, constant delusions of living in a cartoon of sorts where no one is killed off for real and all damage she inflicts is the equivalent of Bugs knocking Elmer out with bombs), she would fall under a valid insanity defense as well.

Killer Moth during his transformed Charaxes phase falls under the same 'rabid animal' clause Atavic Killer Croc has.

edited 27th Oct '14 8:10:38 PM by NapoleonDeCheese

@Frishman: Ooh, I really like that explanation - that supervillains keep getting insanity verdicts because no one in Gotham wants to admit the possibility that they're of sound mind.

There was a discussion on Mightygodking about Batman's villains, how they relate to Batman. Riddler fights Batman the detective. Bane fights Batman the paragon. Joker fights Batman, the symbol of orderly society. But as other people mentioned, it's been taken to the point where the Joker is just a random engine of destruction, which turns him into a flat character. I like the idea of the Joker as a mix of performance artist and general asshole. On one hand, he's really trying to comment on the state of society- but on the other hand, he's a raging narcissist who never bothers to hide his contempt for the peons. The Joker compromises by committing grandiose crimes in the most ridiculous way possible.

If anyone's up for spoilers, it looks like the recent Batman: Endgame arc is finally going to give us a conclusive answer (or as close as we're ever gonna get) as to the truth behind the Joker. While I suspect that it might either be a hallucination caused by the Joker's Toxins or a VERY well-planned scheme, Joker just revealed at the end of Endgame #3 that he knows Bruce Wayne is Batman... by having Joe Chill be patient zero for a virus he unleashed, and forcing him to re-enact the whole "murder a rich family in crime alley" thing again, except with a different family. And even worse, the story is now strongly implying that the Joker may not be truly mortal, perhaps even some sort of demon that's been haunting Gotham city since it's founding.

I know that's probably gonna toss the story straight into Jumping the Shark territory for some fans, but it sure does explain just how the hell does he keep getting away with or surviving his ridiculous plots and near-deaths. Cause seriously, half the shit the Joker pulls falls straight into Xanatos Roulette territory for how complex his plans are, as well as how much knowledge and technical skill would be required, with "A Death in the Family" and this new arc being prime examples.

Can we send The Joker to some remote planet for a year?

I was watching Matthew Santoro on Youtube and just learned there are college classes one can take on the study of Batman as a metaphor for the human condition.

...I wonder if it would be possible to do a variation of an Abnormal Psychology Course on the study of Batman and his Villains. This discussion could be a class project.

edited 23rd Jan '15 10:45:32 PM by WorldTurtle2

I'd imagine only a handful of them, such as Mr. Freeze, the Riddler, Two-Face and Catwoman being worthwhile to study, cause the rest of them aren't terribly difficult to figure out and ultimately do run on (somewhat) logical, albeit harsh reasons. The Penguin's probably the best example, because some continuities basically have him as your typical mob boss with a unique look, a taste for the eccentric, and a poor temperament, but little else to distinguish him from other villains.

You'll notice I didn't mention the Joker. That's because he's hands-down the most complex villain of the entire lot due to how his entire raison-d'etere is to torment Batman and prove to both him and the world how meaningless life really is. He's one of the few normal humans that even super-powered villains are afraid of dealing with, due to how he's utterly unpredictable, beyond insane, and crazy-prepared, just as Batman always is.

edited 24th Jan '15 9:25:44 AM by SgtRicko

Complex? How?

He's four words:

Axe-Crazy Villain Sue.

Six words if you include Plot Armor.

edited 24th Jan '15 10:16:57 AM by AnotherGuy

The Joker's lack of identity, in a way, makes him a mirror of whom is writing and, to a lesser degree, reading/watching him at the time (this trait also plays a lot on a lot of his shtick relying on humor, which is one of the most subjective things ever, and the rest on terror, which is fairly subjective as well. Other villains rely on more concrete, objective motifs, like Ra's and Ivy's ecoterrorism and Riddler's need for intellectual respect) . This is true to some degree of most fictional characters, but it's especially blatant with him. Most comics writers, thanks to Sturgeon's Law, are hacks, so under them, the character will look exactly like his haters would describe him, but under the correct writers, he's brilliant because of how much of a simple yet deceivingly complex powerful archetype he is. His complexity isn't in the character's emotional core, like with the other Batvillains, but what in he means for the setting and the lead character.

Incidentally, a good way of finding out if a writer is good with the Rogues Gallery is seeing if they give them all their own voices or if they make them, to some degree or another, copycats of the Joker in vogue at the time. Too often, for instance, a Scarecrow or Riddler story will feel too 'Joker' for them.

And what villain (or hero, for that matter) doesn't have plot armor, or Mary/Marty Sue traits? It's practically the basis for the majority of the comic book heroes you'll see out there today, and the more popular they are the more badass the writers will try to make them. Case in point: they were supposed to kill Batman off, but immediately chickened out and decided to bring him back a year later, and the whole damn fiasco behind his "death" was confusing as all hell. Heck, he didn't even die within his own comic, but instead within a JLA crossover versus Darkseid. The same goes with Wolverine, who just got killed off a few months prior, but how long do you expect that to stick?

I'll concede you on that point of villains suddenly being written in a different manner, to resemble others who've recently had a much better plot-line. The recent Year Zero run ended with the Riddler pulling off a scheme very similar to what Bane did in ''The Dark Knight Rises", only with the supposed challenge to Gotham's citizens being to try and outsmart him... even though he was completely insincere about it. His whole "I want to weed out the smartest and strongest from the weak, and purge Gotham because it's corrupt to the core" echos a lot of what Bane and the League of Shadows were all about too.