Eight Facts You Probably Didn’t Know About The Joker
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The Joker does not have one past, and that is the only origin that has ever really suited him. The best telling refuses to settle. Every version he offers is true enough to be useful and too neat to trust.
He is older than most of the arguments people have about him online. He was in the first Batman comic in 1940, a killer with a grin, long before cartoons and films turned that grin into a brand you can buy on a mug.
The look owes something to a fixed, terrible smile in the film The Man Who Laughs. Once you have seen the still, you start seeing it again in the cheekbones of every later drawing. The playing-card joke came along for the ride. It was never the whole design.
He has been a prankster and he has been a horror story, sometimes in the same decade. The 1960s television version is camp. Later comics are not. A list that pretends those are the same man in a different suit is a list trying to sell you the suit.
One film performance froze a version so hard that every Joker since has been measured against it, including Jared Leto’s attempt in Suicide Squad. It is fine to say that one did not land. The character has survived worse nights than a messy movie. He has had more of them than Batman.
There is no single real Joker, and that is the fact worth keeping. The moment a story tells you it has finally explained him, it has started lying. He would approve of that. He would not bother to say thank you.