When Exactly Was the Joker Funny?

With all due respect to Bozo and Pennywise, pop culture’s most popular clown is probably Joker, Batman’s archvillain who started making the Caped Crusader’s life hell back in 1940. That’s when the so-called Clown Prince of Crime first appeared in comic books, quickly becoming the Caped Crusader’s top nemesis — and, along the way, the most iconic of all superhero baddies. When Tim Burton hatched his Batman in 1989, the Joker was the villain. The most acclaimed and commercially successful of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy was The Dark Knight, which featured Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance as the Joker. Jared Leto’s Joker in Suicide Squad was universally loathed — as was the film — but even that movie made bank. And, of course, 2019’s Joker brought in more than a billion dollars worldwide, going on to win Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar. We as a society may be racked with a fear of clowns, but we can’t get enough of one particular clown.

This weekend, Joker: Folie à Deux hits theaters, giving audiences one more sampling of Phoenix’s deranged failed stand-up. Whatever your thoughts about this sequel, which is part musical and part courtroom drama, one thing most viewers will agree on is that it’s not very funny. Nor is it intended to be — for the majority of the Joker’s nearly-85-year existence, he’s not what you would call hilarious. To be sure, he can have a sense of humor — a deeply disturbed sense of humor — but I’d argue that few love the character because he’s a side-splitting card. This remains one of the great ironies of the Joker: He’s a clown, but he’s weaponized all the reasons why clowns scare us.

Even at his creation, the Joker wasn’t meant to be even slightly amusing. There are debates about who, exactly, deserves credit for coming up with the character, but in one version of the origin story, Bob Kane and Bill Finger dreamed up this madman thanks to a 1928 film. “(H)e looks like Conrad Veidt — you know, the actor in The Man Who Laughs,” Kane once said of the Clown Prince of Crime, later adding, “Bill Finger had a book with a photograph of Conrad Veidt and showed it to me and said, ‘Here’s the Joker.’”

The film, based on Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel, starred Veidt as Gwynplaine, a young man whose face has a grin carved into it. Treated like a circus freak — he makes his money appearing in public as “The Laughing Man” — Gwynplaine is a haunting, tragic presence, his always-smiling countenance an unsettling distortion of what’s usually an indication of happiness. From there, at least according to Kane and Finger, came the Joker’s unholy rictus.

During Batman’s comic-book years, the Joker was either a murderous psychopath or a mischievous imp, depending on how much the industry’s censors would allow the writers to get away with. But that more lighthearted version was the one that TV producer William Dozier latched onto when he brought the Caped Crusader to the small screen, launching Batman on ABC in the late 1960s. Campy and groovy, the Adam West-led series starred Cesar Romero as the Joker, who wasn’t the least bit menacing. Instead, he was eccentric and slightly debonair — and, boy, did he laugh a lot. In film or on television, with one notable exception we’ll get to, this was probably the last time the Clown Prince would be presented as primarily funny. Of course, the Batman show (and the 1966 film) was principally intended to be a hoot — oh-so-not serious, proudly so — which meant that everybody cracked jokes and played everything tongue-in-cheek. In such a goofy environment, Romero’s Joker fit in perfectly, just another weird dork on a series filled with shameless silliness.

But ever since the 1960s Batman, the people in charge of the Caped Crusader have made sure neither he nor the Joker would ever be viewed as a joke again. Especially with hindsight, though, it’s funny just how funny the Joker would remain, at least in his initial subsequent iterations. Jack Nicholson, who received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the archvillain in Burton’s Batman, was far more twisted than Romero’s Joker, but there’s also a bit of his Jack Torrance from The Shining in the performance as well. The cocked eyebrow, the sarcastic jabs, the chaos-reigns snideness: Nicholson made Joker a devilishly charming master of ceremonies, and he had such a ball in the role that his sly irreverence was really amusing. In fact one of the main criticisms of that film, which starred Michael Keaton as Batman, was that the hero wasn’t nearly as charismatic as its supervillain. Later cinematic Jokers may have wanted to watch the world burn, but Nicholson’s just wanted to throw a huge party.

That mischievous glee would slowly be stripped away over time, though. Mark Hamill’s Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, which started in 1992, had to be relatively toned-down — it was a show geared (at least in part) to younger viewers — but the emphasis was on the character’s demonic laugh, with Hamill supplying variations depending on how the Joker was feeling. (Menacing? Here’s one laugh. Jubilant? Here’s a different one.) But it was never a laugh you felt like joining in with — there was nothing contagious about Hamill’s twisted guffaw. Whether it was Romero or Nicholson or Hamill, the Clown Prince’s laugh was a sinister subversion of genuine joy, just like the character itself was a nightmare version of what was meant to be a clown’s innocent, childlike wonder. The chilling laugh, married to that frozen grin, perverted the idea of what a clown was supposed to be — or, really, maybe it just laid bare what was obvious to everyone already. Clowns are meant to make you laugh, but they seem so downright evil at their core that they scare the bejeezus out of you instead. 

Ledger took these ideas to another level. Of all the onscreen Jokers, his was the least clown-like. Yes, he had the makeup, but it was applied with a messy disregard — slathered rather than precisely done, or as if he’d worn it for days and never bothered to freshen it up. Ledger didn’t bother trying to embody the mannerisms of a clown, either. There was nothing balletic or whimsical about his movements. Rather, The Dark Knight’s Joker was a psychopath who, for whatever reason, decided to take on this guise. Maybe it was because of the scars he had around his mouth. (How did he get them? He has conflicting explanations, each of them upsetting in their own way.) But no Joker was more blatant in his depiction of the fear we have of clowns — our sneaking suspicion that there is something wrong with anyone who wears such heavy, colorful makeup in person. What are they hiding? Why are they trying to disguise themselves? And what are they planning to do to us?

And yet, I’d argue that Ledger’s Joker is among the funniest, albeit in the most gruesome of ways. Where Nicholson’s flaunted his superiority, Ledger’s almost seemed pained to be around people not as smart as himself, which made his exasperation and dry wit even more amusing. Not that you ever “liked” The Dark Knight’s supervillain — just that you respected the depth of his wretchedness and the sting of his deadpan delivery. This was a new way of thinking about the Joker: For as much as the movie has unfairly been criticized for the terrible, “serious” superhero movies that emerged in its wake, The Dark Knight never gets credit for how fiendishly hilarious it often is.

Every Joker since has been haunted by the late Ledger’s portrayal. Most tellingly, the ones who have tried to play the character since have never matched Hedger’s comedic instincts. Jared Leto was a preening, uninteresting Clown Prince, while Joaquin Phoenix, who I think is mesmerizing in Joker, is purposely not trying to make this troubled individual hysterical. (Much like The King of Comedy’s cautionary tale, the failed stand-up Rupert Pupkin played by Robert De Niro, Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck is often painfully unfunny.) Joker’s grim tone latches onto a cruel societal assumption that mediocre party clowns, which is what Fleck is before he gets fired, are depressed, mentally unwell individuals. Jokes barely make an appearance in Joker, which is a somber portrait of a disturbed loner driven to murder, his adoption of the Joker persona a way to let his sick spirit soar. That 2019 blockbuster argued that, not only are clowns scary, they’re actually secretly the cretins killing people on the subway and assassinating talk-show hosts on live television. 

How did we get from Cesar Romero’s jovial Joker to Phoenix’s sociopath? Well, that darkness was there from the beginning, baked into Conrad Veidt’s horrific smile. Every once in a while, though, filmmakers will figure out how to make that foreboding cuttingly funny — especially when Gotham’s notable denizens are being spoofed. In 2017’s The Lego Batman Movie, Warner Bros. sent up its priceless I.P., offering a satirical take on the brooding Batman and the villainous Joker. As voiced by Zach Galifianakis, the Joker was, here, a deeply needy baddie who desperately wanted Will Arnett’s stoic superhero to acknowledge him as his archnemesis. Batman refuses — and, even funnier, nobody in Gotham is afraid of the Joker because they know that, whatever scheme he dreams up, the Caped Crusader will defeat him. As always.

For obvious reasons, Galifianakis’ Joker is the funniest of all Jokers, but that’s largely because The Lego Batman Movie cleverly dissects the tropes (and the clichés) of the Batman Cinematic Universe. In the film’s view, the Clown Prince is just a narcissist overly impressed with his diabolical mind and creepy look — stripped of his scariness, he’s hopelessly hilarious. 

Batman’s world is filled with vivid, potentially funny villains — the Penguin, the Riddler, Catwoman — but none of them have had a stranglehold on the culture the way the Joker has. But for a character who seems like he should be funny, the Joker rarely is. Maybe that’s because it would defeat the purpose of his evilness. We look at the Joker and we see the worst-case scenario of every clown who unnerved us as kids. That garish smile. That weird makeup. That exaggerated laugh. This is the stuff of bad dreams. Only in The Lego Batman Movie is he legitimately funny — and that’s because it allows us the space, for once, to laugh at him.