The Joker. The Profile and Philosophy of a Character Through Literature, Comics, and Film

The Joker has risen from a mere episodic appearance as a negative character in the early 1940s to the fans’ centre of interest either as Batman’s utter foil or the vigilante’s faithful self-reflection. At the same time, the character’s appeal also lies in its permanent transformation and transgression from Victor Hugo’s novel in the second half of the 19th century, to the comic books in the mid and late 20th century, and the films at the beginning of the new millennium. This article aims to offer an overview of the Joker’s features as they appear in three forms of artistic expression – literature, comic books, and film – examining them as embodiments of the Jungian trickster archetype, found in other literary works as well. For this purpose, in addition to the comic books and films where the Joker appears as the insidious antagonist, we have selected three writers who have created Joker-like characters or worlds in their literary productions, namely Victor Hugo with his The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and The Man Who Laughs (1869), le Marquis de Sade with The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), and F.M. Dostoevsky with the novel The Possessed (1872). The rationale behind extending our analysis to several works is that, in order to ascertain the character’s function as an archetype, it must appear as an explicit figure in as many works as possible, or at least emerge as a mental projection. Such an approach would qualify, in our opinion, for an assessment of Carl G. Jung’s theory of the archetypes rooted in the collective unconscious (Jung 1959/1969), since the term “collective” implies a large number. The criteria considered in opting for these particular writers and novels took into account defining themes in the profile of the Joker that were identified in the above-mentioned works, in addition to the portrayal of the character in comic books and films. These overarching ideas included: the masks of insanity, the appearance of monstrosity, perspectives on the essence of human nature, evil and psychopathy, chaos and nihilism, the relation between madness and power, the radicalization of the philosophy of protest and subversion, the fabrication of morality, good versus evil, dominance and control, psychopathology and deviance, the providential leader, freedom and choice. At the same time, the order for introducing these writers’ works into our analytical interpretation will be based on preference for the chronology of their respective contents, and not the succession of the writers’ lives. In other words, we will start with Victor Hugo because not only did he inspire the creation of the Joker, but he also introduced the image of the disfigured fool as alterity and alienation in the medieval world, as represented by the characters of Quasimodo and Gwynplaine. Then, we will delve into the 18th-century libertinage and moeurs with Sade’s amoralists from the citadel of The 120 Days of Sodom. And, lastly, we will probe into the analogy between the Joker and Verhovensky from Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed, as elements of evil and radicalization of nihilism in the 19th century. Together with the comic and cinematographic adaptations of the Batman stories (featuring the Joker) set in the 20th and 21st centuries, the profile of the Joker as an archetypal character will demonstrate its validity. With the exception of Victor Hugo’s character, Gwynplaine, from the novel The Man Who Laughs, whose serving as the original source of inspiration for the Joker in Batman was attested by the creator of Batman, Bob Kane himself (Kane, 1989), the interpretation of the characters, themes, and other particularities from the literary works approached in this article as part of the Trickster archetype manifested by the Joker, is entirely original. To our knowledge, there is no previous academic study that has examined these works through a Joker-focused perspective.