Thisis a good Batman: The Animated Series Joker clip too.
Good point. Read The Killing Joke and Arkham Asylum last. Oh, and I suppose you should probably check out a Death in the Family. I don’t like the story myself, but it’s rather central to the Batman/Joker relationship. The backstory on this one is that Batman has a new(ish) Robin named Jason Todd that *none *of the fans liked. He was the scrappy doo of Robin’s.
Joker is a dangerous villain because he’s especially problematic for Batman. Batman wants to protect people, and while other villains will kill or harm, they’ll generally not do so if it’s not in their best interests. Joker will kill someone just for the hell of it. Batman’s a detective, and while other villains make it hard for him, they still have goals, they act in predictable and reasonable ways. Joker doesn’t.
Non Spoiler, Death In The Family contains one of my favorite quotes about the Joker.
“Forget helping me! Find his body! He’s not dead unless you find his body!”
Really? You folks feel that the Killing Joke is a good example of how evil the Joker is? Iirc, nobody died in that one. In the Dark Knight Returns, he kills about 300 people in a few hours of escaping Arkham, about 20 of them a boy scout troop that he fed poisoned cotton candy to, and then to top it off
kills himself to frame Batman. Oh, and just before that, he beats (and possibly rapes) Seleena Kyle (Catwoman.)
Cool.
I want to subscribe to his newsletter.
IIRC, the guy who thought he was negotiating the sale of that run-down amusement park gets killed by the Joker – even though the Joker’s colleagues have already gotten the place signed over, but Mista J honestly wanted to hear the sales pitch anyway, presumably just to set up the assorted quips he delivers as the dose takes effect.
This. I’m convinced that what makes the Joker so dangerous is that he knows he’s in a comic book, he knows none of it is real, and so he knows that it doesn’t matter WHAT he does. There’s no consequences for him. Hardly anybody else in the DC comics have figured that out. So why wouldn’t he do just whatever evil thing occurred to him, for the LOL’s?
Also, he’s an evil, scary clown.
His article on Wikipedia states that his physical skills are variable, being largely dependent on the writer. In his best stories, is he usually physically skilled?
Thank you for that list, NAF1138. I think my college bookstore, and maybe library, has most of those books.
The Joker causes pain and mayhem and death because he thinks that the suffering of the victims and those who try to stop it is part of a big sick cosmic joke. He commits outrageous crimes not for profit, but because they are outrageous. Combine this with no remorse and very high intelligence and he is just kind of the devil incarnate.
I’ve always preferred this exchange between Batman and a therapist to explain the Joker’s driving force:
Dr. Adams (Joker’s therapist): The Joker’s a special case. Some of us feel he may be beyond treatment. In fact, we’re not even sure if he can be properly defined as insane. His latest claim is that he’s possessed by Baron Ghede, the Voodoo loa. We’re beginning to think it may be a neurological disorder, similar to Tourette’s syndrome. It’s quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here. A brilliant new modification of human perception that is more suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century.
Batman: Tell that to his victims.
Dr. Adams: Unlike you and I, the Joker seems to have no control over the sensory information he’s receiving from the outside world. He can only cope with the chaotic barrage of input by going with the flow. That’s why some days he’s a mischievous clown, others a psychopathic killer. He has no real personality. He creates himself each day. He sees himself as the Lord of Misrule, and the world as a theatre of the absurd.
Well, he wants all the buffalo dead…
You’d think he’d mellow out, though, considering he’s also a smoker and a midnight toker.
He returns to insanity every time he asks himself, “What the @#%&! is a pompatus, anyway?”
The only reason he’s scary any more is that he’s got the writers and the marketing people at Warner on his side.
Since he has the writers on his side, he can escape from any prison, no-one EVER thinks to just shoot the bastard, he’ll never be executed despite the tens of thousands of murders he’s committed, etc.
Realistically (inasmuch as anything in comics can be realistic) he’d have been extradited to say, Texas and executed, or some Gotham citizen would look out his window, see him pushing his henchman in front of a truck and just assassinate him.
And given his death-count and the given fact that no cell can hold him for longer than he wants to be held, Batman should have just snapped his neck a long time ago.
There was a story where Bats had the ability to let the Joker die as a result of a failed scheme of his–not kill him, just not actively save him (I don’t remember the details–perform CPR, put a tourniquet on him, administer an antidote…something like that but more complicated and time consuming, IIRC) and Gordon is saying “Don’t–just use the time you’re saving him to stop a robbery somewhere else–stop a murder. Break up a drug deal.” and instead, Batman wastes his time saving the Joker. That’s when I stopped being interested in the Joker.
Another one had the second Robin (who was beaten to death by the Joker–but got better (don’t ask)) about to shoot the Joker. The second Robin had Bats tied up with one arm free, gave Batman a gun and said “You have three choices: do nothing and I’ll shoot the Joker, shoot the Joker yourself or shoot me.” and Bats chose to shoot (ok, throw a razor sharp batarang into) Robin rather than let the Joker die. This is just bad writing.
HG Wells said “If anything is possible, nothing is interesting”. Writers have been going to such idiotic lengths to make the Joker immune to everything that he’s not scary any more. There’ve been stories about the Joker vs Superman or Wonder Woman or Green Lantern or The Spectre–and the Joker always gets a stalemate at best when he should end up as a pasty white smear on the pavement. Used right–a very hard to capture, very elusive Batman villain who randomly kills (ala Hannibal Lector) and who strikes from the shadows, he’d be scary. For him to take on the entire Justice League, to hold parades in public, to taking over the UN building, to getting in fights with The Spectre? Meh.
A Joker who’s smart enough to NOT take on the Green Lantern Corps or Superman would be scary. A Joker so stupidly overpowered that he CAN take them on doesn’t make him scary, it makes him boring.
The only thing that makes him dangerous any more: he’s popular and marketable and the writers will warp the plot and make all the characters idiots to make sure that he stays marketable.
I gotta say I really like the idea that he realizes he is in comic book universe and it really is one big joke that he can take to the next level.
Ok, sure. But that’s sort of a killjoy argument that ignores why he became popular in the first place, and why/how he went from being a goofy bank robber to being something that was, for a time, genuinely scary.
I haven’t really read comics regularly in about 10 years, but the really good Joker stories are some of the best Batman stories, and the best Batman stories are some of the best superhero stories.
In comics everything jumps the shark. They usually go on to beat the shark up, kill it, dance on its dead body then electrically reanimate it and start all over from square one. That doesn’t mean that the good stuff wasn’t ever any good.
What makes him so dangerous? Poor writing.
Not many people know this, but the Joker is a great dancer.
Well, he started out damn scary - announcing he’d kill certain people in advance, then using various methods to administer his trademark poison (in death, the victim’s facial muscles tighten, forming a pseudo grin). He tried to stab Batman but in his fury, drove the knife into his own chest. The character was supposed to die, but the editors saw a good thing and an unkillable legend was made.
And this was in, I kid you not, Batman #1, the 1940 version, no bloody A, B, C or D. It was only years later that the character got all goofy, pulling boners and such.
Psychopathy isn’t insanity in the legal or usually understood sense.
The Joker isn’t insane; he is not delusional, doesn’t hear voices, stuff like that. (Well, not in most realizations of the character.) His understanding and perception of reality is as good as any ordinary person’s. He is, however, a psychopath, as you point out - he lacks conscience and empathy. The emotions of other human beings don’t matter to him except as a means to his ends.
Believe me as someone who’s dealt with one; psychopaths are scary. Most of them are losers, of course - a very common trait of psychopaths is a lack of foresight, thus leading to a lot of personal and professional failure - but the few who can be successful are scary as all hell.
We generally aren’t conscious of it but our dealings with other human beings are based on a very deep, fundamental assumptions, both instinctive and learned, about how other people will act. Most people act in a reasonably predictable fashion; even most people you don’t like lie somewhere along a generally predictable continuum of human behaviour, and once you know something about them you make predictions, usually unconscious but generally accurate, about how they will act, based on your fundamental understanding of human behaviour - part of which is the assumption that humans are endowed with empathy, conscience, guilt, and an understanding of the emotions of others. Psychopaths, however, are quite different from normal people, and are difficult to predict, impossible to deal with, and often totally alien to usual experience in the way they act and deal with things.
They are, in other words, frightening. And when you throw in the Joker’s brilliance and love of destruction, he’s all kinds of scary shit.