The Man Who Laughs, The Movie That Inspired Joker, Headed to the Public Domain

The Man Who Laughs, a 1928 film that helped inspire the creation of iconic Batman villain The Joker, will enter the public domain on Monday, January 1. So far, most of the commentary around this year’s public domain offerings centers on Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willie, but there are other major books, movies, and characters set to lose copyright protection in 2024 as well, including Tigger (whose first appearance in a Winnie-the-Pooh story came 95 years ago) and feature films starring Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers, among many others. With The Man Who Laughs, the story and characters will finally appear in the public domain, decades after aspects of the movie started to be used in a very public domain-like way.

Even if it weren’t obvious on its face that The Man Who Laughs inspired The Joker (and it is), creators have long acknowledged the connection. In the movie, Conrad Veidt plays a man named Gwynplaine, who was disfigured as a child and whose face is stuck in a permanent, eerie smile. With pale skin and dark circles under his eyes, anyone who didn’t know which came first could easily mistake Gwynplaine for the first-ever screen adaptation of The Joker.

As with everything about the early days of Batman, creators Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, and Bob Kane have had conflicting accounts of who created what aspects of The Joker, but in a rare case where he 

“Bill Finger and I created the Joker. Bill was the writer,” Kane once told Entertainment Weekly in 1994 (via Mental Floss). “Jerry Robinson came to me with a playing card of the Joker. That’s the way I sum it up. But he looks like Conrad Veidt – you know, the actor in The Man Who Laughs, [the 1928 movie based on the novel] by Victor Hugo. There’s a photo of Conrad Veidt in my biography, Batman & Me. So Bill Finger had a book with a photograph of Conrad Veidt and showed it to me and said, ‘Here’s the Joker.’”

That interview with Kane might have happened for Entertainment Weekly, but in a spin on why the public domain and other not-for-profit media preservation is so important, it is only available to us via the Internet Archive, because EW seemingly never put it online. Interviewer Frank Lovece did, but has since stopped maintaining the website where it was hosted.

The Man Who Laughs has been name-dropped in numerous Batman-related projects over the years, including the 2005 miniseries Batman: The Man Who Laughs by Ed Brubaker and Doug Mahnke (which told of Joker’s early crimes) and the character The Batman Who Laughs. Created for the Dark Nights: Metal storyline, that character is a multiversal doppelganger of Batman who went mad after killing The Joker. Since the film is an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel of the same name, the underlying ideas of The Man Who Laughs have been in the public domain for a while. Still, it was specifically Veidt’s unsettling portrayal of the character that inspired The Joker.