A Brief History of The Joker

Warner Bros

There is a very particular reason that The Joker frightens us. At first glance, you might not find his skinny build or dilapidated style or clownish visage all that horrifying. But when you look beyond, when you look into the mind of the Clown Prince of Crime, you peer into the void, and that void asks you a question best captured by a line in Alan Moore’s “Batman: The Killing Joke”.

“All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.”

What’s frightening is not that The Joker is inhuman or possesses superpowers or is possessed by some evil entity. He is none of these things. He’s just a man. It’s what he reminds us of that frightens us—that the difference between us and him is not so great as we’d like to imagine, and that's why the painted supervillain is so compelling.

The Joker is set, once again, to thrill and terrify us in David Ayer’s film, “Suicide Squad,” where he is portrayed by actor Jared Leto. This latest, and very different, incarnation of The Joker stands at the head of a long and fascinating 75 year legacy. Let’s explore that legacy in this brief history of The Joker.

Comic Book Origins

DC Comics

Inspired by the creepy 1928 silent film, “The Man Who Laughs,” The Joker first appeared in the comic, Batman #1, as Batman’s inaugural villain—a figure who would go on to become the caped crusader’s most persistent and popular villain. The Joker was meant to die from an accidental self-inflicted knife-would in his very first issue, but was saved by a last-minute editorial decision to have him survive.

The Joker, from the very first, was a brutal killer, his appearance steeped in murder, but editorial decisions gradually softened the character, and by the 1950s the Joker had morphed into a campy, light-hearted trickster more fit to be marketed to children.

For a time, The Joker fell from the public view until being re-popularized by the 1966 Batman TV Series, and its film spinoff, reemerging in the 1970s as a likable, yet villainous figure, and then again in the 80s in a darker incarnation, being reimagined as a serial killer whose intellect was the twisted equal of Batman’s. His brutality, showcased by his fatal bludgeoning of Robin with a crowbar, showed the Joker to be not just another villain, but one intimately connected with Batman’s personal life, as he has remained ever since.

Campy Fun

20th Century Fox

Actor Cesar Romero was the first to portray the Joker’s persona onscreen, interpreting the character in a softer, campy, and clownish way. Romero’s Joker first appeared in the 1966 television show, Batman, in the episode, “The Joker is Wild,” where he escapes from prison via a cartoonish catapult. Romero perfectly captured the personality of the Joker of the 1960s—a zany trickster more focused on getting the better of Batman rather than murdering and creating anarchy. Romero went on to be featured in 22 episodes of Batman, concluding with “The Joker’s Flying Saucer”.

Romero also played the Joker in the character’s first film role in the 1966 Batman: The Movie—the pinnacle of campy fun.

This era of The Joker was largely defined by the Comics Code Authority, and its ban on excessive violence in comic books, resulting in largely light-hearted villains who mostly served as plot devices to keep protagonists busy. With American culture rapidly changing, however, the Joker’s next film appearance was a wholly different beast.

A Dichotomy Emerges

Warner Bros

It was Jack Nicholson who embodied the essence of the reimagined Joker of the 1980s—a character who takes the trickster elements of Romero’s Joker and places them into the body of an intelligent, ruthless killer who takes them on after an encounter with Batman sends him plunging into a vat full of caustic chemicals. The Joker of Tim Burton’s Batman possesses the familiar traits of The Joker that audiences had already known—garish dress, the makeup, the smile, but all of these traits are expressed in a psychotic, sociopathic way, creating a disconcerting mixture of camp and evil.

The film’s director, Tim Burton, describes his Joker as “A character who operates on the outside of society and is deemed a freak and an outcast and has the freedom to do what they want…they are the darker sides of freedom.” Indeed, the 1980s saw the rebirth of the Joker in the comic book world, and that rebirth looked very much like Nicholson’s portrayal of the Clown Prince of Crime.

Grim and Gritty

Warner Bros

Perhaps the most well-loved and famous portrayal of the character, Heath Ledger’s Joker in the 2008 film, “The Dark Knight,” was a masterwork in acting. Responding to a post-9/11 America in fear of terrorism, Ledger’s Joker is a study in anarchy and fear-mongering.

Leaving all traces of Romero’s light-heartedness behind, Ledger’s Joker is, in a word, a terrorist. While still possessing the theatricality of the previous incarnations of the Joker—the visual and physical style which runs through every portrayal—Ledger brings a new seriousness to the role.

This Joker, more than any before, is truly terrifying, and is so because of his motivations—as Alfred wisely says, “Some men just want to watch the world burn”.

This Joker pushes you. He terrifies you, enrages you, and drives you to the brink of madness. He wants to show you how pathetic and meaningless your plans are. And when you’re broken, he wants you to show the world that you’re truly, deep down in your deepest of hearts, just like him, even if that means placing a gun in your hand, putting the barrel to his own forehead, and encouraging you to pull the trigger.

And scary thing is, after watching the film, you know that he can succeed.

The Gangster

Warner Bros

Although we can’t know exactly how the Joker will be portrayed in the upcoming film, “Suicide Squad,” where he will be portrayed by Jared Leto, we can make some inferences.

Leto’s Joker is nothing, if not flashy. Covered in tattoos, blinged-out teeth, and driving a purple Lamborghini, this Joker appears to be more materialistic and integrated into society than his more isolated predecessors. This is, perhaps, a version of The Joker that is more suited to organized crime than anarchy and chaos—the opposite of Ledger’s portrayal. This Joker literally wears his character traits, his tattoos proclaiming everything from “deranged” on his forehead, to “Ha! Ha! Ha!” on his chest, looking every inch the drug lord archetype that he’s likely to be.

“To the Joker, violence is a symphony,” Leto says of his character. Whatever direction this iteration of The Joker takes, we can expect him to be just as menacing and terrifying as ever.

The Animated Joker

Warner Bros

No history of The Joker would be complete without a nod to Batman: The Animated Series, which is widely considered to be some of the best storytelling in the Batman universe. Inspired both in visual aesthetic and in music by Burton’s Batman films, this animated Joker is a direct nod to Nicholson’s portrayal.

But it’s the voice of Mark Hamill that really makes the villain come alive.

Ask anyone what The Joker sounds like, and chances are, Hamill’s voice will spring to their mind. Massively significant in exploring The Joker’s backstory, The Animated Series showed the character to be “delightfully deranged,” as Hamill puts it, his capers ending up hilariously weird as often as they are deadly, embodying the comedian-criminal.

Hamill would go on to become the definitive voice of the Joker, both in animation, and in the Arkham series of Batman video games, and his infamous cackle still remains the first thing many of us think about when The Joker is mentioned.

That Unforgettable Laugh

Warner Bros

Few villains have captured our attention, made us laugh, terrified us, and repelled us quite like The Joker. Although the character has changed alongside our culture over the decades since his inception, the essence of The Joker—the use of a symbol of happiness, the clown, to embody a criminal —has remained the same. This dichotomy causes The Joker to remain a compelling villain—perhaps the most legendary of all time, the eternal foe and image of what Batman could have become after the traumatic death of his parents.

His thematic question remains, more relevant than ever in such a culturally turbulent time—"What could one bad day do to you?" Remember that The Joker is only one side of that coin. The scarred side. The dichotomy of Batman and the Joker, the difference in their responses to their tragedies, shows us an important truth.

It's up to us what we become.