The Joker is the greatest villain in the Batman mythos, and the rare bad guy who defines his hero as much as the hero defines himself. First appearing in Batman #1 in 1940, the Clown Prince of Crime is a killer with no clear origin, no real name, and no motive beyond proving that anyone can be pushed over the edge the way he was. Where Batman represents order and control, the Joker is pure chaos, and their war has run for more than eighty years across comics, film, and games without either one ever really winning.
Who Is the Joker?
The Joker is a homicidal criminal mastermind who terrorizes Gotham City with a permanent grin, green hair, and a bleached white face. He is not driven by money or power in the usual sense, which is what makes him so hard to stop. What he wants is to prove a point, that the line between a sane man and a monster is one bad day, and he spends most of his existence trying to force Batman across that line to prove it. He is funny, theatrical, and genuinely terrifying, and the mix of comedy and cruelty is the whole reason he works. You are never quite sure whether the next thing out of his mouth is a joke or a death sentence.
The Joker’s Origin
The Joker’s origin is deliberately a mystery, and that is by design. The most famous version comes from Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke in 1988, which tells the story of a failed comedian who falls into a vat of chemicals during a botched robbery while wearing the Red Hood disguise, emerging with the bleached skin and green hair that become his trademark. The book is careful to undercut its own story, though, with the Joker admitting he is not even sure it happened that way, and delivering the famous line that if he is going to have a past, he prefers it to be multiple choice. That refusal to pin him down is a big part of why he has lasted. A villain with no fixed origin can be reinvented endlessly.
The Joker and Batman
The relationship between the Joker and Batman is the heart of both characters. The Joker does not simply want to kill Batman, he wants to break him, to prove that the Dark Knight is only ever one tragedy away from becoming just like him. That is why he refuses to kill Batman even when he has the chance, and why Batman refuses to kill him no matter how many people the Joker murders. They are locked together, each one defining the other, and the Joker knows it. He has said more than once that he would be lost without Batman, and the twisted truth is that Batman might be lost without him too.
The Joker and Harley Quinn
The Joker’s most infamous relationship is with Harley Quinn, and it is not a healthy one. Created for Batman: The Animated Series in 1992, Harley started as Dr. Harleen Quinzel, a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum assigned to treat the Joker, who instead manipulated her into falling for him and breaking him out. Their dynamic is genuinely abusive, with the Joker treating Harley as a tool and a punchline rather than a partner, and a lot of Harley’s best stories over the years are about her finally recognizing that and getting out. The pairing has become so popular that Harley long ago outgrew being a sidekick and became a headliner in her own right.
The Joker’s Worst Crimes
Two of the Joker’s crimes stand above the rest for how deeply they cut Batman. In A Death in the Family in 1988, the Joker beat Jason Todd, the second Robin, nearly to death with a crowbar and then blew up the building he was trapped in, killing him. Readers infamously voted by phone to decide Jason’s fate, and they chose to let him die, making it one of the darkest moments in comic history. The same year, in The Killing Joke, the Joker shot Barbara Gordon through the spine and paralyzed her, purely to torment her father, Commissioner Gordon. Barbara went on to become Oracle, but the attack remains a defining Joker atrocity, proof that he hurts people not for gain but to make a point.
The Joker in the Batman: Arkham Games
For a lot of gamers, the definitive Joker is the one from the Batman: Arkham series. He is the central villain of Batman: Arkham Asylum in 2009, orchestrating the entire takeover of the asylum from a cell, and he returns in Batman: Arkham City in 2011, where his story takes a genuinely shocking turn. Dying from the same Titan formula he used to enhance himself, the Joker spends the game desperate for a cure, and at the end he dies for real, which almost no Batman story ever dares to do. His death hangs over Batman: Arkham Knight in 2015, where he appears as a hallucination haunting Batman, who was infected with the Joker’s poisoned blood. The idea of the Joker living on inside Batman’s own head is the smartest thing the series did with him, and the moment in Arkham City when he finally goes still landed on me harder than I expected from a video game villain I had spent two games hating.
Who Has Played the Joker?
The Joker has been played by a remarkable run of actors, each leaving a mark. On film, Jack Nicholson defined the role for a generation in Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989, Heath Ledger won a posthumous Academy Award for The Dark Knight in 2008, and Joaquin Phoenix won his own Oscar for the standalone Joker in 2019. Jared Leto took a swing at the character in Suicide Squad, and Barry Keoghan turned up in a brief version in The Batman. In games and animation, though, the definitive voice belongs to Mark Hamill, who has voiced the Joker since Batman: The Animated Series in 1992 and carried the role through the entire Arkham series. Hamill’s laugh alone is worth the price of admission, and for me he is the Joker more than any live-action version ever managed.
The Joker endures because he is the perfect opposite of everything Batman stands for. He is chaos to Batman’s order and a mirror held up to show the hero what he could become. Whether he is cracking jokes over a murder in the comics, dying in Batman: Arkham City, or laughing in Mark Hamill’s voice, the Joker remains the villain the whole Batman legend is measured against, the one enemy Batman can never truly defeat and can never bring himself to end.
