Just a Joke of a Character That Has Grown Old

In general I am not one who is afraid to voice my opinion. I have done it on this blog many times, so I am starting this one off by saying the following is my opinion and everyone is free to agree or disagree. I know this opinion will most likely not be popular, but that has never been my concern. Feel free to disagree with me here, as I am willing to bet there are a lot who do.

As many here know I am not a fan of Batman, a boring character to say the least. Some time ago I wrote about my issues with him.  At that time I mentioned just how bad a character The Joker is and that I would write a future post on that.

Well here is that post.

The Joker is about the most overrated character in comic books, ever. He is a poorly conceived one trick pony that grows old quickly. But of course you look at most of Batman’s enemies and you can see a pattern of them just not being interesting.  However The Joker is the one everyone seems to love and is too often at the forefront of Batman’s big stories.

The basic character of The Joker is a criminal "mastermind" (I’ve never seen any real proof of this) who is crazy and chaotic. Oh, and for some reason, which keeps changing, he is disfigured in a way to be pale with a huge, ugly grin. And that really is all there is to his character. There is no depth to him at all, in the least. He is an asshole because he is an asshole so he is an asshole. That really is it.

I have no problem with keeping his past a secret, which they sometimes do, with then often ret-conning it or just ignoring what has been put out there, going with the Joker being a really unreliable narrator.  But how long do you keep that up? Now it worked, and was about the only thing that worked, in the movie The Dark Knight. There we only have to deal with this for one movie. In the comics however, if he is supposed to be an interesting bad guy, I need something more. He is just the same joke over and over again, going nowhere. In order to keep the character a "mystery" and play off the chaotic concept, they have painted themselves into corner where the character is not able to be anything more.

We get told he is charismatic, yet this is never shown to us.  I have never liked how a highly educated, strong and intelligent woman got caught up in a fascination with him and destroyed her life for him. I never saw The Joker display any attributes that I believe would have that effect on a woman. Even in the real world, the "bad boys" who get the girls and very much drag intelligent, strong women down, normally have something that you could see as attractive. The Joker has a complete lack of any charming attributes. I have seen several versions of how The Joker played Harley, but none of them have been believable for me. I don’t buy it. Harley Quinn might be a fun character, but I do not believe her back story. It is an overly forced concept. At least they seem to have realized this as Harley has escaped that relationship that from the get go was absurdly abusive, with nothing else to it. The Joker and Harley never had a loving relationship at any level at any point, which all the more makes it hard to believe Harley would have ever fallen for him.

Now going off of The Joker fully lacking charisma, we get into the issue with him always having a loyal gang. In the Tim Burton movie this at least is shown by him already having a loyal gang before becoming The Joker, but everywhere else it just doesn’t work.  The Joker is about creating chaos, I get that. And yes, there will be people out there who will join in and help create that chaos. Now those kind of people are not going to be loyal, because chaos does not create loyalty. That is the nature of chaos. In The Dark Knight we see The Joker killing his first batch of goons just because he can. When he takes over the Gotham’s underworld, he does it with no one at all loyal to him. Then when he has put together a mountain of money and in front of goons who are not loyal to him, but to the other crime lords, he sets the money on fire. These goons don’t give a damn about chaos. They want money.  That scene should have ended with every one of those goons shooting The Joker, then putting the fire out. And that is really how much of The Joker’s schemes should go. Your average criminal goon is not going to risk it all for convoluted, over complicated schemes that are not going to pay out big. They want cash, quick and easy cash. The Joker does not deliver that. He is not going to have loyal goons. If anything he might have a group of zealots, who see him as some kind of religious figure. That would be more believable, except a person still needs charisma to start up a cult. Maybe if they had The Joker hire a PR person with charisma to do the real work for him.

For me The Joker is an interesting character for the first five seconds, but grows old rather quickly. I want my villains to be interesting and have some depth to them. A sense of mystery is fine, but a character can be developed and be something more while keeping that mystery. The Joker just has nowhere to go as a character. He is a holdover from the "golden age" of comic books, and while most such characters have been updated, too many just never come together for effective modern age characters.

So that is my opinion of The Joker.