THE BEST SUPERVILLAIN IS THE WORST SUPERVILLAIN

Anarchism; comic books; super villains; censorship; coulrophobia; jokes; fiction; film; Jungian archetypes

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He’s been a crazed clown, a jewel thief, an anarchist, a failed comedian, a ‘gender-bending serial killer’[i], a terrorist, a kidnapper, and the most horrifying supervillain of them all. Which one do you like best?

Batman first appeared as long ago as March 1939, (Detective Comics #27). Within a year, he’d landed his own comic book. But Batman wasn’t the only remarkable character in Batman #1. You opened it to see a face that was about to get very familiar very quickly. If Batman needed weapons, motivation, a crusade, the Joker laughed at all that fuss and throat-clearing. From the very first panel, he was, well, the Joker - ‘1940s scary’;[ii] the Clown Prince of Crime. The greatest supervillain was on stage and it was no laughing matter – except that it was. Joker-venom contorted his victims’ faces into ludicrous imitations of his own death’s head grin. You might suspect that hilarity itself had metastasised into some fatal and highly-contagious disease.

Did the slightest trickle of guilt moisten the Joker’s flinty conscience? Decidedly not. Crazed, unfeeling laughter was already part of his make up. So, too, was – ahem - make-up. That unmistakable look was there from the get-go – fish-white skin, bright red lips, hair like the patina that develops on copper… It was as if the criminal were trying to make life easy for eyewitnesses.

It was a unique physiognomy all right and it provided a big old clue to the Joker’s personality. The famous psychologist, Carl Jung, wrote extensively about the ‘persona’. He meant the socially-acceptable face that you and I present to the world – smiling, happy, confident, adjusted. Every bad thought we have, every socially-unacceptable desire…we repress them into the Shadow: ‘The dark sinister side of our nature, consisting of repressed material […] and universal images of evil’.[iii] Once the Shadow achieves a certain demonic density, well, that’s when we start to feel the drag and twist. The Joker’s rictus is a travesty of the persona. His smile is a trapdoor. Underneath, it’s all Shadow.

A trapdoor indeed. Here we hit on the nature of the joke itself (I wrote about it in a previous newsletter, which you can read here.

Here’s how most jokes operate: Someone tells you two stories at the same time. They deceive you into thinking you’re listening Story 1, (they’re just reeling you in; stringing you along), and then abruptly reveal that you were listening to Story 2 all the time! Truth appears and at the same moment tension vanishes. And when tension vanishes, you laugh.

Jokes are lures with traps and springs. They are smiles that dissolve to reveal…what? Something sinister, for sure.

‘[I]t’s this edge of danger, this shadow side, that gives jokes their power. A joke is anarchic, a little scrap of chaos from beyond the boundaries of the rational, a toe dipped in the shallow end of anti-social behaviour’.[iv]

‘A little scrap of chaos’: that’s exactly what a joke is; that’s exactly what the Joker is. A little scrap of chaos on the Gotham City wind.

Another point about jokes: Not everyone gets the point. Certain people despise them. In fact, they’d prefer to regulate jokes out of existence. Think about Members of Parliament, Senators, line-managers, the famously-humourless Batman – every one of them sells you Story 1 for a living. That’s why they fear the joke that opens the trapdoor on Story 2. This is another way of saying that they hide the truth (this is literally true in the case of Batman, who wears a mask to work).

People who can withstand screams and howls; people who are capable of ignoring both human misery and logical argument – satire is the weapon that renders them defenceless. Mockery is their Kryptonite. Jokes pull out the rug from under them and slip in a banana skin. Jokes drop anvils and pianos on their heads; jokes perch buckets of water on their doors; jokes smack ‘em with a custard pie. And they can’t stand it. They just can’t stand it.

The Joker represents a shellburst of illogical, mixed-metaphor chaos beneath the trapdoor. He’s free jazz, the Merry Pranksters, the serpent hidden in the flower. Who would have him any other way?

Comic book readers got him another way. 1942 brought an editorial mandate at DC[v] calling for lighter, brighter stories and more child-friendly material. And then – worse yet - came the dread year 1954, etched into the folk memory of nerds everywhere. The psychiatrist, Frederic Wertham became the Carrie Nation of the comic books; the figurehead of a widely-despised clean-up campaign. The Comics Code was intended to ward off juvenile delinquency.[vi] Publishers banded together and agreed a set of rules to regulate, capsize, and scuttle their own product. Henceforth, comic books must not be ‘lurid, unsavory, [or] gruesome’. Damn, so what was the point of them? Month after repetitive month, good triumphed over evil. Words like ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ remained verboten.

For the horrifying, terrifying Joker, this hardly augured well. Thirty-five years passed. The greatest of all supervillains was ‘not what we think he’s like now’.[vii] Three-and-a-half decades he spent, masterminding series upon series of gaudy, ludicrous crimes (maybe ‘mastermind’ isn’t the right word). In one story, (Batman #44), he used casino winnings to assemble a megalomaniac slot machine, trapped the Dynamic Duo, and dropped giant coins on them.[viii] That’s just stupid. Declawed and defenceless, the Joker tried his hand in the jewel-thief business. But what kind of jewel thief drives a walloping great purple Goon Car, ludicrous to tax and, you’d think, impossible to park?

The Joker had become just that – a joker. A joke, even, a walking punchline whose schtick was precisely the kind of crappy Heath Robinson gadget that readers could order from the back pages of the comic books themselves.[ix] The Jester of Genocide carried his own exploding cigars, noxious pies, a particularly enthusiastic joy buzzer.

This version of the Joker, most fans will tell you, was an imposter. A jewel thief, a robber, really? Whoever your favourite Joker may be – Cesar Romero with his moustache Tipp-Ex’d out; gurning Jack Nicholson; the scrawny maniac of The Killing Joke – he’s no jewel thief or burglar. The Joker’s never that. The Joker isn’t capable of that.

Why not? The explanation is almost too obvious to notice.

Thieves and robbers share a motive you and I can easily understand, even if we don’t necessarily sympathise with it - greed. But the Joker can’t be a thief or robber. Greed is a motive and motive is alien to him. Do you remember Heath Ledger setting fire to the vault full of money in The Dark Knight? Not only didn’t he want the money; he didn’t even care about it. Cash? It might as well have been a pile of bus tickets or Odour Eaters. He didn’t care.

‘Motives,’ wrote the novelist Martin Amis, ‘don’t have what it takes to motivate people any more’.[x] They definitely don’t have what it takes to motivate the Joker.

Psychology’s best-known theory of motivation is Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The Joker’s has his own special, personal hierarchy, very different from yours or mine. Taking the loot means breaking the rules, for sure, but that in itself means recognising them. A Joker who recognised the rules would be indistinguishable from any common-or-garden crook who cheats at the same game you and I play so nicely. But the Joker is no common-or-garden crook. He doesn’t want to play our game. The Joker wants to see the game burn.

If the Joker is difficult to understand it’s because he cannot be understood. He is literally unreasonable: the Joker has no reasons. If he wants ‘to cause boundless terror and chaos’,[xi] it’s for the sake of the boundless terror and chaos.

The Joker doesn’t need money, respect, fame, any of that. No surprise he’s so dangerous. It makes you wonder what else he doesn’t need.

An origin story, that’s what. Only twice - in all the comic books, graphic novels, TV shows, and films - has the Joker received anything approaching an origin story. You’ll know the movie Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix. It showed Arthur Fleck transmogrifying into a twin brother for Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Later, in the sequel, it turned out that Fleck didn’t become the Joker after all. He never was the Joker. He couldn’t have been, because, well…

Thirty-five years earlier came what we might call the original origin, in Alan Moore’s graphic novel, The Killing Joke[xii] (which recapped a plot from 1951 - Detective Comics #168).[xiii] A man had one bad day. The Joker spends much of the story insisting that everyone - even the sanest of us - is exactly that far from madness: just one bad day. Indeed, that’s the point – Moore’s Joker attempts to give Batman ‘one bad day’, and thereby turn his opposite number as mad as himself. The insistence on an origin story struck many fans as the only weak point in what was otherwise a brilliant piece of story-telling.

Not only does the Joker need no origin, he should have none. An origin is an explanation and some phenomena - conjuring, comedy, evil - are best left unexplained. One researcher has argued that The Killing Joke’s origin story ‘forced readers to question just what separates a hero from a villain’.[xiv] Maybe so, but the Joker is hardly the man for the job Villainy like his has no why.[xv] That’s what makes it so villainous.[xvi]

If he should have no origin, the Joker should have no ending either. Batman must never kill him, not even when the Joker murders Robin (Batman #426 and #427). The supervillain who has been called a ‘nearly mythical avatar of mayhem’[xvii] must be as eternal as he is inhuman. I mean ‘inhuman’ in the literal sense: the Joker is not human.

He’s an archetype. If you have ever encountered the work of Carl Jung, you’ll have heard the term before. Jung imagined a structure that lay below the personal unconscious identified by his mentor, Sigmund Freud. He called it the collective unconscious. Think of it by analogy with human bodies. They’re all roughly the same – limbs, organs, and so on - yet each one – each organ – is also individual, distinctive, and unique. As long as the organs work together, we muddle along fine. It’s the same story with the collective unconscious, which contains a set of archetypes that are common to everyone. They’re vital, meaningful figures – ‘universal themes or symbols’[xviii] - that all of us recognise on some instinctual level. ‘[They] can only be explained,’ Jung wrote, ‘by assuming them to be deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity’.[xix] (‘Constantly repeated experiences’ sounds like the monthly exploits of comic book characters, doesn’t it?)

‘The archetype,’ Jung went on, ‘in itself is empty and purely formal […] The representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts’.[xx] One of these archetypes is called the Hero, whose latest incarnation wears a cape.[xxi] Another is called the Trickster (see where I’m going with this?) The Trickster rebels against…well, ‘Whaddaya got?’. He’s an anarchist, a revolutionary, that scrap of chaos on the Gotham City wind.[xxii] We love this guy at the same time as we hate and fear him.

Love him? Yes we do. Some do, anyway. How many other supervillains graduated into their own monthly comic? DC produced a nine-issue Joker series in 1975. The cover of the first issue showed the Joker ridiculing Batman’s other foes: ‘Two-bit baddies!’ And which villain got us queuing at the cinema for the very first, Michael Keaton era, Batman film? It wasn’t Mr Freeze.

There’s a reason why the Joker wears a layer of cosmetics so thick you could bury your Nan in it. It’s to remind us that the surface is, after all, cosmetic. We may not know what’s underneath the circus paint, but we do know it ain’t pretty. The Joker’s job is the job of any Fool in history. It’s to reveal the Truth…and the Truth isn’t pretty, either. Existence is a joke and we know how jokes work. The Trickster yanks open the trapdoor; we plummet into Story 2. The joke turns out to be extremely dark: There’s nothing in the basement at all.

‘It’s all a joke. Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for…it’s all a monstrous, demented gag. Why can’t you see the funny side? Why aren’t you laughing?’

That monstrous, demented gag. It’s all the Joker cares about.[xxiii] Not even winning and losing. What are they to him? Like Rudyard Kipling, he treats those imposters just the same. ‘I don’t want to kill you,’ Heath Ledger’s Joker assures Batman. ‘What would I do then?’

His comment wasn’t without precedent. Batman #251 features the Joker for the first time in a generation. The long, dull years of the Comics Code are over. The greatest supervillain has ‘returned to his roots’.[xxiv] He knocks Batman unconscious but hesitates, pauses… ‘No!’ he cries. ‘Without the game that Batman and I have played for so many years, winning is nothing!’[xxv]

Here are some words from a man who knew something about comic books: ‘You’ve got to admit our heroes need [supervillains]’, wrote Stan Lee, ‘…as much as they need the Blue Cross!’[xxvi] (And now I’ve managed to quote him in a newsletter, maybe I can retire.)

‘The Joker is not so much a Doppelgänger as an antithesis, a force for chaos. Batman imposes his order in the world; he is an absolute control freak. The Joker is Batman’s most maddening opponent. He represents the chaos Batman despises, the chaos that killed his parents.’[xxvii] Batman and the Joker are utterly codependent. Hero and villain, they might as well be the two faces of a coin. (See what I did there? Two-Face is guaranteed a name-check whenever nerds discuss Batman and the Joker.)

The Joker’s a joker because Batman isn’t. He can’t be. Batman’s the guy in charge. Batman’s a headmaster; a moraliser; a kill-joy. Batman (like a Graham Chapman character from Monty Python) does not enjoy a good laugh. That’s why he is by far the easiest superhero to laugh at. Why is Batman jealous of Superman? Superman got adopted. What do Putin, Batman, and Will Smith have in common? They all attacked a comedian…

And if Batman can’t prevent the fun all on his own, he can get help. Legions are at his disposal: soul-destroying legions. You know Bruce Wayne employs a thousand technocrats - ten thousand - all of them at it nine-to-five, cooking up new ways to enforce the rules, one PDF file at a time. Wayne Enterprises has its own HR department, doesn’t it? Ugly to think about, yes, but it must. Bruce Wayne needs his HR. The Joker wouldn’t know a ‘PDF file’ from the criminal the phrase is routinely substituted for.

And so people love him. Paul Dano may have made an excellent villain in the most recent movie, The Batman, but – admit it - the Riddler wasn’t the one you wanted to see, was it? The film’s best bit was right at the end, when you discovered just who exactly was in the jail cell next to him, giggling while Gotham drowned. Who doesn’t have a ‘scrap of chaos’ inside? Who doesn’t sometimes feel the light touch of clownish abandon? When the tax return is due, yet again, we’d appreciate a pinch of that anarchistic spirit - wouldn’t we? - a dash of the crazed carnival moxie? When the city council reveals its latest mandate; when the last Keep Out sign is nailed to the last tree at the edge of the last field? That’s when a really solid dark joke finds its giddiest audience.

To learn about the dark, Jung thought, is to learn about the light. Goodness itself has two faces. First there’s the fresh physiognomy of the terminally naive. If one knows nothing of life, a simple sort of goodness may not be impossible to achieve. A few trips round the block, though, a few dings and bangs, and it’s another story. Knowledge of evil is the only sure path to genuine, lasting goodness, goodness worthy of the name. As Jung said, ‘knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.’[xxviii]

Oh, and even darkness isn’t all bad. Here are some words from the world’s most famous psychologist: ‘The Trickster is the precursor to the saviour. […] Why? Because you’re a fool when you start something new. And so if you’re not willing to be a fool you’ll never start anything new and if you never start anything new you won’t develop and so the willingness to be a fool is the precursor to transformation […] you’re going to get smart as you move forward’.[xxix]

That leaves us with just one question: Why so serious?

Be an anarchist! Be a rebel! Show them what you think of them, their petty rules and regulations! Hah! Such timidities are not for the likes of you! Bang a button below!

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[i] Morrison, Grant: Supergods – Our world in the age of the superhero, Jonathan Cape, London, 2011, pp23-4

[ii] Englehart, Steve: ‘Foreword’, in Peaslee, Robert Moses & Weiner, Robert G: The Joker – A serious study of the clown prince of crime, University Press of Mississippi, 2015

[iii] Maltby, John, Day, Liz & Macaskill, Ann: Personality, Individual Differences & Intelligence, Second edition, Pearson, London, 2010, p53

[iv] Carr, Jimmy & Greeves, Lucy: The Naked Jape – Discovering the hidden world of jokes, Penguin, Michael Joseph, London, 2006, p7

[v] If we’re being pedantic, at the time it was usually called Superman-DC.

[vi] Robb, Brian J: Superheroes – From Superman to The Avengers, the evolution of comic book legends, Robinson, London, 2014, p100

[vii] Englehart, Steve, op cit, emphasis in original

[viii] Collins, Sean T: ‘The complete history of The Joker’, Rolling Stone, December 16^th, 2019

[ix] Weldon, Glen, The Caped Crusade – Batman & the rise of nerd culture, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2016, p104

[x] Keulks, Gavin: ‘Revaluative Realism: Money and Meta-mimesis’, Martin Amis Web, 2002, Available at: Father & Son 6 (martinamisweb.com). Accessed 12^th November, 2024

[xi] Ash Cocksworth, quoted in Saidi, Amira Rihab: ‘The Representation of Evil Figures through The Various Embodiments of the Joker Character in Three Films of the 2000s’, 4^th International Conference on Future of Social Sciences & Humanities, 20-22 May, 2022, Rome, Italy

[xii] Moore, Alan & Bolland, Brian: Batman - The Killing Joke, Deluxe Edition, DC Comics, New York, 2008

[xiii] Collins, Sean T, op cit.

[xiv][xiv][xiv] Del Campo, Michel: ‘Sympathy for the Devils: An Analysis of the Villain Archetype Since the Nineteenth Century’, Masters thesis, July 2017, Available at "Sympathy for the Devils: An Analysis of the Villain Archetype Since th" by Michel Martin Del Campo (tamiu.edu)

[xv] Russell, Christian: ‘Heroic moments – A study of comic book superheroes in real-world society’, Explorations: Social Sciences, nd, pp121-131

[xvi] The most chilling line from Primo Levi’s account of his life in a concentration camp – perhaps the most chilling in all account of lives in concentration camps – refers to the time when, maddened by thirst, he snapped off an icicle to suck. A guard stopped him. ‘Why?’ Levi asked. The guard replied, ‘Hier ist kein warum’.

[xvii] Collins, Sean T, op cit.

[xviii] Maltby, John, Day, Liz & Macaskill, Ann, op cit, p52

[xix] Jung, Carl: ‘Confrontation with the unconscious’ in Anthony Storr (ed) : Jung – Selected Writings, Fontana Press, London 1986, p70

[xx] Jung, Carl: ‘Psychological aspects of the mother archetype’ in Anthony Storr (ed), op cit, p84

[xxi] Russell, Christian, op cit.

[xxii] I slightly misquote the psychologist, Jordan Peterson, from this YouTube essay: The Psychology of The Joker | Dissecting Minds (youtube.com)

[xxiii] Harris, Alan C: ‘Trickster in American Pop Culture: A Semio-Discursive Analysis of Batman and the Joker in the Hollywood "Batman" Film’, American Journal of Semiotics, Vol. 14, Iss. 1, (Winter 1997), pp.57-78.

[xxiv] Weldon, Glen, op cit, p117

[xxv] Killing Robin, though - as he was to do a decade or so later - that was a different matter. That was just dandy. DC Comics organised a phone-in vote. Most readers agreed: Off the brat.

[xxvi] Lee, Stan: Bring on the Bad Guys – Origins of Marvel villains, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1976, p7 Emphasis added.

[xxvii] Jürgens, AS: ‘Batman’s Joker, A Neo-Modern Clown of Violence’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5(4), 2014, pp441-454.

[xxviii] Carl Jung, quoted in The Psychology of The Joker | Dissecting Minds (youtube.com)

[xxix] Peterson, Jordan, op cit