The Joker is Batman’s archenemy and one of the most iconic supervillains of all time. It’s easy to see why, given just how incredible it is to watch their dynamic play out. Batman is the incorruptible bastion of order, while Joker is chaos and unpredictability given flesh; it’s caring for everyone versus not caring about anything. Their battles are legendary, with the Clown Prince of Crime featuring heavily in most of Batman’s most famous and beloved stories. Even beyond his awesome interactions with Batman, the Joker is a charismatic character all his own. He’s a perfect mix of monstrous and funny, and his antics constantly keep the audience and Batman on their toes. Or at least, they should.
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What made the Joker so great was that he rode a fine line between being a heartless monster and acting like a clown. You would see the Joker commit crimes and take lives, but you would also see him tell stupid jokes and pull what effectively amounted to giant pranks. He was a ruthless crimelord, but he had this connective string you could trace, where he did everything he did because he thought it would be funny, even if it was only funny to his sadistic mind. In recent years, however, the Joker isn’t a clown or even a villain anymore: he’s just a pale embodiment of slaughter whose only goal is to rack up as many kills as possible, while screaming at Batman about some bent psychology. The Joker isn’t the Joker anymore, and DC has lost one of its best villains because of that.
The Past & Present Joker
Ever since his introduction in Batman #1, Joker has been a heartless menace. The Golden Age gimmick was that he was a humorless mafioso who looked like he does, the joke being that the clown was super serious. Over time, he evolved to be a multi-faceted character, including his obsession with Batman, his ruthlessness, his black humor, and his incredible narcissism and desire to prove he was the best at committing crimes. The Joker was fleshed out to a very strong degree. One of the best showcases of his unique character came from The Joker: Devil’s Advocate, a story where Joker was framed for a murder that the courts ultimately ruled him out for, as the crime took greater mental capacity than the insane Joker possessed. Throughout the trial and subsequent sentencing, Joker repeatedly made his situation worse by confessing to his usual crimes because he was insulted that he was compared to what he considered to be amateur hour, and was perfectly fine with getting the electric chair when he was told it was going to be the best broadcast thing ever. In the end, Batman proved his innocence, and Joker bemoaned how he’d had to live knowing Batman saved his life. This story perfectly illustrated all of the cornerstones of what makes Joker such a compelling character.
In contrast, the modern Joker doesn’t have nearly as many facets to his personality. Nowadays, his obsession with Batman has been blown up to cosmic proportions, and that’s fine, but that’s all that he has. He no longer cares about proving himself as the best criminal, trying to be funny, or getting attention. All he cares about is making Batman suffer. How does he do that? By murdering as many people as possible, obviously, because Batman cares about life, whereas the Joker doesn’t.
Because the Joker only cares about one thing and only ever goes about achieving that goal in one way, he has gotten painfully predictable and boring, which are the last things the Joker should ever be. Just look at a modern story like “Joker War,” where the Clown Prince of Crime revealed he knew Batman’s secret identity and took over Gotham City. Joker only focused on Batman and didn’t do anything but create a big show of chaos to make him mad, but this event was entirely unoriginal. Gotham had already been taken over numerous times by other villains recently, and Joker himself had done it just a few years prior! Joker threw away every other part of his personality to only focus on Batman and flashy kills.
All Flash, No Substance
The biggest problem with modern Joker isn’t his sole obsession with Batman or lack of other traits: it’s that writers seem to think that every time the Joker shows up, it has to be an even more destructive event than the last. Some of Joker’s best stories include The Killing Joke and The Dark Knight Returns, two incredible stories that pushed the Joker past every line and boundary the character had up until that point. These stories are incredible and beloved for very good reasons, but many people seemed to learn the wrong lesson from them. Instead of seeing it as the Joker being a narrative foil that perfectly contrasts Batman, a lot of people seemed to think we love those stories because of how brutal and shocking the Joker’s actions are. Now, every Joker story seems to want to be the next big thing by having him be even more violent and evil than ever before.
The problem is that you can’t climb upward forever, especially not in terms of destruction like this. At a certain point, especially given how frequent it is because of Joker’s popularity, it just feels gratuitous. The Joker’s horrible actions stop being painful and just get boring to look at, and because every reader knows some horrible “worse than anything you’ve seen before” tragedy is coming every time, instead of having an impact, those extreme moments fall flat. As the Joker constantly tries to go bigger and bigger, we lose the personal touch to everything, and murders instead become required checkboxes that need to be filled.
And of course, the Joker can’t exactly murder Batman’s entire side character cast every time he shows up, so his atrocities affect mostly unnamed people, which makes them feel even less important because nothing ever changes from this, and the crimes are forgotten instantly when Joker is beaten. Stakes that can only expand are the same thing as having no stakes. The Joker isn’t making a point or pushing the envelope with his murders; he’s just doing it because that’s what the Joker does. It’s routine, uninspired, and boring. The Joker isn’t even funny anymore; he’s as dull as a green-haired rock.
Bad Villains Drag the Story Down Too
In trying to constantly make the Joker more shocking with each appearance, while also having him show up more often than any other villain Batman faces, the Joker has become a parody of himself. It’s gotten to the point where his actions are so heinous that the excuse of going to an asylum instead of death row isn’t even comic-book believable anymore, and people blame Batman for not killing him. The Joker is no longer a villain: he’s just a walking, talking plot device used to make Batman angry and the world angry at Batman. Where Joker was once a clown who committed crimes, we now have what DC treats like the very embodiment of evil itself. It’s gotten to the point where the Joker is so impossibly evil that even villains like Lex Luthor refuse to work with him because they think he’ll just murder all of them on a whim (and he might). Joker can’t even do villain team-ups anymore because he is almost legally required to kill every person he sets his eyes on, and it’s not just making his character worse; it’s making the entire world around him worse, too.
Many fans can no longer see the Joker as anything other than a monster that needs to go. Even villains with objectively higher kill counts, like Darkseid and Brainiac, don’t garner nearly as much vitriol because their stories don’t only focus on the heinous acts like Joker’s do. Joker has become evil for evil’s sake, and his stories make Batman seem like an increasingly worse hero, as every other storyline focuses on the Joker reappearing and taking more lives than ever before, calling Batman out on it, then disappearing to do it all over again. Batman doesn’t have to be able to save the Joker, but fans have to believe that Batman stopping the Joker matters, and as of now, it doesn’t, because we know he’ll come right back and do it all over again.
Not only has DC lost one of its most interesting villains by downgrading the Joker like this, but they’ve actively made everything around him boring by association. The Joker has to change in some capacity because, as it stands, a lot of fans have extreme Joker fatigue. Give the Joker an identity that isn’t just this pointless repetition, have him make Joker-fish or take over an amusement park because he’s jealous of how everyone’s going there, and fans will actually be interested in him again. The Joker has the potential to be one of the best villains out there, but he doesn’t work as a bland knife.
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