Wits and Giggles

It’s the bared teeth. Slightly yellow but still gleaming between the candy-apple lips. Clenched and hungry. Ruthless. You wouldn’t call the Joker’s expression a smile—not unless you were kidding yourself.

There’s agony in the villain’s bloodthirsty grin. There’s rage behind the eyes, battling against the pain for dominance. Maybe there’s a smear of satisfaction—let’s face it, the man loves his work— but he isn’t necessarily happy. He’s ferocious.

In the nearly eight decades since he began menacing the good people of Gotham City, the Joker has taken on many identities, worn many faces and had many names. Just like the devil himself.

Still, for all his vary­ing origin stories, he’s instantly recogniz­able, and not just for the green hair, pale skin and purple suits. All Jokers share an un­repentant delight in chaos for its own sake; their antics aim to torment the helpless and innocent, and they’re always able to spring surprises on Batman, a hero who prides himself on preparing for the worst.

In its official character biography, DC Com­ics lists the Joker’s defining power as “complete unpredictability.” That aligns perfectly with his latest screen incarnation, arriving in theaters October 4. Joaquin Phoenix stars in the savage, heartbreaking R-rated character drama titled simply Joker. The film spirals into the ruined psy­chology of a man named Arthur Fleck, a wannabe stand-up comic who makes ends meet as a clown for hire on Gotham’s mean streets. Crippling mental illness and a long history of abuse make it increasingly difficult for Fleck to deal with life’s mounting indignities and defeats. He’s a constant punch line, until the day he snaps and decides to hit back. But in true Joker fashion, each of the film’s seeming revelations only raises more uncertainty about its main character.

“I really like the idea of something that challenges the au­dience,” Phoenix tells Playboy. “Every time I felt we were certain about what motivated his actions, I became less inter­ested. We would constantly try to challenge ourselves while making it. There’s not one moment, not one catalyst that cre­ates this character. The pleasure for me in being part of it was not having the easy answers.”

The Wayne family looms over the story, but there’s no giant bat here; the Joker’s nemesis is within. This is the DC Comics version of Taxi Driver, or The King of Comedy featuring Nor­man Bates instead of Rupert Pupkin. It’s no coincidence that Robert De Niro turns up as a late-night talk-show host revered by the main character.

Arthur Fleck is a name comic book fans won’t recognize, an original creation of director and co-writer Todd Phillips, the filmmaker behind the Hangover trilogy. Phillips acknowl­edges that he could have made the same movie about a strug­gling comedian who turns homicidal without any of the DC Comics framework. But what’s the fun in that?

“There’s a spirit in me, and I know it’s in Joaquin, of taking something revered and fucking with it a little,” Phillips says. “The comic-book movie world is this unstoppable machine, and this movie isn’t going to stop it and probably won’t change it. But to take it and turn it on its head a little? That’s actually very Joker.”

As the villain tells Batman in 1988’s graphic novel The Killing Joke, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland, “If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! Ha ha ha!”

No one needs to hear Batman’s origin story again. School­children can recite the details of Thomas and Martha Wayne’s alleyway death—and young Bruce’s vow for justice—like the pledge of allegiance. The Joker, by contrast, has always been an enigma, a chameleon, a shape-shifter. Comic book scribes and movie makers have outdone one another in recent decades, creating a panoply of alt-histories for this snickering trickster. None of the Joker backstories is more true or valid than any of the others, and that’s how DC prefers to keep it.

“Like a lot of mysterious characters, he works because we don’t know his origin—and he’s often portrayed as an unreliable nar­rator,” says comics legend Jim Lee, DC’s publisher and chief cre­ative officer. “Even when he’s telling you, ‘This is how I came to be,’ you don’t know if it’s the truth or not.’”

That became a defining part of director Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, in which Heath Ledger, in his Oscar-winning turn as the Joker, uses a ventriloquist-dummy voice to unspool conflict­ing tall tales about his ghastly facial scars. Tragic backstories can create empathy for a character, says screenwriter David S. Goyer, who has a “story by” credit on the 2008 box-office juggernaut. The filmmakers were more interested in arousing fear and anxiety, and nothing accomplishes that like someone lying to your face.

“We thought we shouldn’t do an origin story,” Goyer says. “We should just make him exist, and furthermore, we should make him slippery, with these sort of Choose Your Own Adventure origin sto­ries. When we first posed that to Warner Bros., even after the success of Batman Begins, they balked: ‘How can you do that?’ and ‘Which one of these is true?’ We said, ‘You’re never going to get the an­swer.’ That’s one of the reasons he was truly scary.”

The Joker first appeared, without explanation, in the spring of 1940, cutting a path of murder, rob­bery and mayhem through Gotham City in Batman No. 1. The Caped Crusader himself had debuted less than a year earlier, as a masked vigilante in Detec­tive Comics No. 27. As the crime fighter’s popularity soared, the Joker became a way for creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger to pit their stoic, shadowy hero against a flamboyant, wisecracking foil. Even in their first clash, the Joker manages to draw out Bruce Wayne’s sense of humor. “You may be the Joker, but I’m the king of clubs,” Batman says, deliv­ering a groaner of a dad joke with a right hook to the Jok­er’s jaw.

Eleven years after the crossed character’s debut, Finger wrote a backstory in 1951’s Detective Comics No. 168 that identifies the Joker as the Red Hood, a bur­glar in a tuxedo and a face-concealing crimson dome who is discolored and disfigured after plunging into a vat of chemicals during a failed heist. The Killing Joke expanded on Finger’s story 37 years later by adding that the Joker had been a struggling stand-up comedian before he be­came the Red Hood out of financial desperation. The 2014–2015 comics series Batman: Endgame pro­posed an even more eccentric origin, implying that the Joker is a supernatural near-immortal who, like Stephen King’s Pennywise in It, turns up through­out Gotham’s grim history.

Some things stick, some don’t. “Whatever is embraced by fans and readers is what accumulates as canon,” Lee says.

In 1989, Tim Burton’s Batman created yet an­other new identity for the character, with Jack Nicholson playing mid-level gangster Jack Napier, the triggerman who murdered the Waynes during a mugging. There’s no Red Hood, but the movie re­tains the notion that being mutilated in a chemical bath drove Napier to madness. From there, the cau­tious Napier becomes a wild man. He indulges. He takes what he wants. He destroys anyone in the way.

“That makes Jack Nicholson’s Joker one of the stronger versions we have available,” says Uni­versity of California, Los Angeles clinical psy­chologist Andrea Letamendi, who explores the psychology behind superhero storytelling on the Arkham Sessions podcast. “This is his true nature, and he’s found a way to express himself and actu­alize those inner feelings of chaos and destruc­tion. He’s enjoying his life so much.”

The Joker’s brazen lack of remorse is one source for the disturbing combination of attraction and repulsion that he inspires in us. “We don’t feel safe around this person,” Letamendi says. “Our natural inclination is to be fearful and avoid him. But that freedom and sense of enjoyment of his experience lures us in.”

Call it toxic charisma. From Cesar Romero’s amused, alliteration-spouting antagonist on the campy 1960s TV series to Mark Hamill’s dastardly and dashing 1990s ver­sion on Batman: The Animated Series, one of the unifying Joker traits is magnetism.

“This is why Jared Leto fell flat for us,” Letamendi says of the so-called Juggalo Joker from 2016’s Suicide Squad. “The edgi­ness went so far, but he didn’t have the charm or appeal. He was supposed to be tatted up and cool, but that’s different than gen­uine charm.”

The Joker’s flexibility has made him a nearly infinite re­source for DC. “He can manifest himself in various forms be­cause he’s a modern-day boogeyman,” Lee says. “He’s beguiling in his own way because he’s so over-the-top.”

The company is so confident in the Joker’s mainstream ap­peal that, in addition to the new film, it’s releasing three comic-book titles about him in October, each featuring a dif­ferent mythology. Two of them—Kami Garcia’s Joker/Harley: Criminal Sanity, and John Carpenter and Anthony Burch’s The Joker: Year of the Villain—drop on the same day, October 9, while Jeff Lemire’s Joker: Killer Smile hits three weeks later.

Asked why he thinks the Joker provides such rich material for storytellers, Phoenix points to the malevolence in the clown’s eyes. “When you don’t have a definitive, clear backstory, it allows us to project our ideas on it. And that engages us. The character forces us to examine ourselves and our behavior.”

The actor grins, wide and sinister. “Also, son of a bitch—he just looks cool.”

In that reading, the Joker remains fascinating not because he’s aberrant but because he’s a funhouse mirror. We’ve all crossed paths with his type many times. The greater fear is not becoming his victim but becoming him. In all his forms, the Joker is someone who has lost his humanity. He feels nothing except selfishness. He can only rid himself of hurt by inflicting it on others. We recognize the mercilessness. We know the narcis­sism. We sense the misery tearing him to pieces from within.

We could almost feel sorry for the Joker, if only he weren’t laughing at us.