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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Brill. I'm Lee Chung-Greffo, and this week we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. Today I'm sitting down with Joel West. He is the author of The Sign of the Joker, the clown prince of crime as a sign.
And so Joel, tell us a little bit more about this paper. I'm curious how did you get to write an academic paper about the Batman character, the Joker? So that's actually interesting, Lee. Thank you for asking.
I started off, and I'm just finishing my master's degree at this point, but I, when I was doing my undergrad, one of my classes was a class called Modeling Evil and Disease. And the professors, they were a philosopher, a medical doctor, tried to give us an idea of what is evil, what is disease, how do we create that in our society, what do we consider these things to be. And for that class I wrote a paper called The Joker on the Couch, a Case Study, which became I guess the seed for this larger monograph, this larger work. So that's interesting, because Lee, around in your paper, you sort of ask the question of is the Joker insane?
And what does that mean? Kind of one of the only consistent things about the Joker that we see in all of his different versions throughout all the different comics over the last 80 years or so now that he's been around. The only consistent thing about the Joker is that he is described as insane or a crazy clown, something within that. Do we ever find out if he's actually insane?
And how do you define that? Okay, so that's the problem, because we don't know, and we have a problem in our culture about what is evil versus what is sanity. And so we like in many cases, and I'm going to, these are very fine definitions, what is evil? And evil is a moral thing.
It is the opposite of good if you will. So we have good and we have evil. And so if you are doing things that harm people, then we presume that you're evil. But what we've done in modernity then is said, well, sanity is good thinking.
Adity is healthy thinking. Sanity is proper, quote unquote thinking. So given that fact, if sanity is proper thinking, then evil is improper thinking. And what do we call improper thinking?
We call that insanity. Are the two things really congruent? Are they the same thing not necessarily? Because one of the things that we've done with insanity is we've said that people who are insane are not responsible for the things that they've done.
We have a term that legal term that non-compostments, namitas. So if somebody is not capable of understanding that they've done evil, are they sane? If somebody has gone out to properly harm somebody, are they, and these are hard questions and we don't have answers to them in our culture. So what we do is we say, oh, that's crazy or that's insane.
An example, I think would be, and to make a large example, take it way up there, is was Adolf Hitler insane. And that's a hard question because if he was insane, then he wasn't responsible. But if he was sane, that makes him a monster. We don't have room in our culture these days for monsters.
We really haven't made that space. And I think that's part of the reason we see a resurgence now of kind of occultish movies and horror movies from every now and then, because we really don't have that space. So that's interesting because you also explore whether Batman is insane as well. The Joker and all of his different permutations talks about the fact that he has been driven insane by one bad day.
So whether that's him failing his stand up comic or something going wrong when he gets involved in crime, he has been driven insane by what's happening in society around him. And the Joker tries to say that Batman is insane because he also had one bad day. His parents are murdered and then Batman decides to avenge their death by donning a bat suit and fighting crime, which doesn't really seem like a sane reaction. So did you find out through your research whether you could define if Batman is sane or not?
See, there's so much in that question. So I'm going to take it and I'm going to let's look at even the history of the Joker. If we look at the Joker from the 1930s, late 1930s, early 1940s, the Joker originally started off as a quote unquote, but not necessarily insane. And it's only later incarnations of the Joker that they decided, oh, okay, we're going to make him crazy now and we're going to make him this clown and we're going to do all these other things.
And so it's only over time that this has happened. Just the same with Batman where he was just this guy in a suit that had this weird way of fighting crime. And then over time, he came to this great creature, this mythological idea. And so it's interesting to me that we decided that, okay, this is the Joker and because we have to decide which Joker are we talking about?
Are we talking about Heath Ledger? Who was a brilliant Joker? Are we talking about Mark Hamill's Joker? Who does also a brilliant Joker?
Are we talking about the latest version of the Joker? The question is which one? Each one has their own identity in many ways. And so when we talk about the Joker as a stand up comedian even, we're talking about something that Alan Moore created in 1988 with the Killing Joke.
Prior to that, the Joker had been the scientist who had worked in this laboratory. I think that's part of the necessity of the Joker's that he changes generation and for each generation. So that the current version of the Joker is a very, very much a 2000s Joker. He's a Joker who from the Todd Phillips movie.
This is a Joker who has been buffed in society, who society has created, but even that Joker has problems in terms of a medical diagnosis. I mean, if we want to look at a medical diagnosis, if we want to actually say, well, what does medicine have to say about the Joker? That's one thing. If we want to talk about what culture has to say about the Joker, that's a completely different thing.
And part of the problem is that culture and medicine have split and have created kind of this gulf between the sciences and the humanities. So that I don't even know that science can talk about culture or has the language to do that. And actually, that's what I'm hoping to do in my doctoral work. That's a completely different aside.
But the point being that there are so many different things about the Joker that has changed and have had to change. I mean, not too many folks know that the Joker had his own comic book either. He was the hero of his own comic book for, it was a ten issues. And they finally got rid of it because it didn't so well.
But the point is that they had this thing and it existed. And there are little bits of lore that kind of have appeared and then kind of vanished. And I think that those are those are the things that fascinate me. These kind of here's this little twig and let's follow that to oh, there's no leaf at the end of this.
Let's see if there's another twig that we can follow that similar to that. You would mention all those different origin stories and his failures as stand up comic. I always thought that was part of the Joker canon in the same way that that man losing his parents was. But apparently that is part of this practice called retconning, which pops up in comics a lot.
And retconning and how's that used in comics to tell stories about the characters? Well that's interesting. So retcon is a it's a portmata where meaning retroactive continuity and here we have the whole idea of continuity. So that you know how Star Wars folks start talking about how Han Solo shot first and then how that was changed between various editions of Star Wars Episode 4.
And so is it canon that Han shot first or did he not? And there are arguments over this. So the whole idea is is there a complete history to a character? Does a character have a real history of beginning and in the middle and in end much like we do?
And the answer to that is that's impossible of course because the Joker doesn't age. The Joker just has not aged. He's what over 80 years old now and yet he hasn't aged. Batman is over 80 years old and he hasn't aged.
So the question then is if the characters aren't aging, they still have to change. Their stories have to become fresh. They have to exist today. Somehow they have to kind of fit with kind of an ethos that exists.
The zeitgeist as they would call it probably. And so I'm using it in terms of zeitgeist here in the technical sense, not in the popular culture sense but in the sense that Hegel would say that there's a world spirit that dominates every era of history. In this sense the Joker as he changes or Batman as he changes or even the various Robins as they change represent various different zeitgeist, different world spirits. So the question really is this then is how can we do that?
How do we do that? And so sometimes we can do it very clumsily and sometimes we can just say oh by the way, Joker's hair is purple now and we don't give a reason for that and people go okay I guess this has happened and we don't know why and there's no real reason behind it but that's fine. Sometimes what comic books do is they will start branches of universes and so there will be several versions of a character existing quote unquote at the same time although what they say in different timelines. Or what will happen is they will just do retroactive continuity and they'll say oh by the way this character was always like that we just didn't know that and here's a new piece of information we're going to give you about this character that makes it fuller.
An example of that would be I guess the thing who has been grim from the Fantastic Four and welcome we knew as a character and suddenly in the 80s happened to mention to somebody that he is Jewish and we go oh okay so we haven't mentioned this but now we've presumed that he is default whatever that means and then suddenly he becomes Jewish. It happens with other characters when suddenly we discover that Dumbledore is queer out of nowhere. I might mention the Dumbledore example JK Rowling seems to be the queen of repconning it seems that every few years she sprinkles new breadcrumbs about different characters and sometimes it's a it's a big part of the character like Dumbledore being queer and other times it will be something so random and inconsequential for a character. Like Anthony Weinstein is Jewish who knew and who is he but there you have it you have so example like that but the point being that many times this will give more of a depth to the character sometimes it will allow us to take the character in a different storyline or a different plot point and so that's that's what red conning does.
Sometimes they do it miraculously Barbara Gordon is as we recall in The Killing Joke oh by the way spoilers was was maimed and and had to after that was in a wheelchair until suddenly she wasn't. Was it useful I don't know was it on purpose I don't know and in many cases what happens is that comic book storylines become so heavy and they become so how much do we have to remember that they just say you know what we're just going to stop everything happens here we're going to kill off some characters and sometimes they've been killed off and then reappear much later on again because that's also part of the ecology of comic books that nobody who dies actually stays dead. But yeah no this is how red conning works it kind of allow you to either add new points to kind of clear the ecology for again for example we knew that the Batman was a hero and then we started to add to his backstory we start to let folks know and that story becomes better. But then let's say we want to add something to that or that's what we want to change that that's where we do the red conning.
I'm also fascinated by this idea that so many of the jokers origin stories are in Congress and it also feels like an integral part of his identity we see that in the dark night with Heath Ledger's Joker it seems like we never really know why he got those scars we don't know if his narrative is reliable whether any of those stories that he's telling are actually true because they're all different. And so you talk about these competing storylines that the Joker has but we also see that with some of the other villains in the Batman comics like Selena Kyle also known as Catwoman for example she has many different competing origin stories or in those different universes as you talk about. So I'm wondering how the Joker is really different from some of those other characters like is this something particular to the Joker that he has storylines that don't exactly match up that he doesn't have one canon like Batman does. Again that's really interesting and it needs to be unpacked and it's important to note for example that Selena Kyle is Catwoman Edward Enigma is Joker that Penguin has we know who the Penguin is we know who Scarecrow is nobody knows who the Joker is and that's part of his I think his mistake there's we can't go back and say oh this guy he was the Joker we can't say this is where the Joker plausibly came from we can make up all sorts of stories was he a failed comedian possibly was he a lab tech or a genius scientist probably but those are in conguous back stories so how do we then decide who and what he is I mean Selena Kyle you know Catwood Oswald cobble pot Penguin but we don't know who the Joker was and we want to know in general I think we want to know and I think it's the fact that he's so mercurial in that sense that we don't even know where he comes from I mean others I've heard people talk about well there's an archetype a trickster archetype but I think that that's really kind of simple and simplistic I think that I guess there is this trickster archetype but I think the Joker is several archetypes he's more than one he's he is kind of all the dark archetypes he is the shadow you know he is the the evil that kind of lurks within us as well these are dark sides that we don't want to see I think that he is also yes he is the trickster who wants to play tricks and sometimes does good blind sometimes he doesn't do good but but in many cases and their folks who have sometimes suggested there's an erotic component to the Joker and although again I personally don't see it it exists that there in fan fiction so so I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that while the Joker definitely you know he's compelling we don't know anything we can't say anything fixed about him at any time even where we can say at least we know X about Selena Kaim we know X about cobble pot at least we know X about Jonathan Crane that he is the Sierra Crow at least we know why about Edward Nigma that he is the Riddler the Joker who knows one of the things that I thought about a lot reading your piece I know you say that each Joker is a reflection of another Joker that there's not one Joker that is sort of the archetype but to me I always thought that Heath Ledger was the best version of the Joker because you couldn't nail down what his character was whereas the Joker that we saw in Todd Phillips movie we have this really in-depth exploration into why he became the Joker and you know you see all of the reasons in society why he sort of fell apart are we beginning to over explain the Joker now at this point are we losing some of that mystery that makes him so interesting in the first place I don't think so I think that each generation has its own mysteries around the Joker so when we look at with each Jack Nicholson Joker as an example the Jack Nicholson Joker is a hood and he's a good Joker and he's a good Joker for his time and I think that each Joker really reflects who he is of his time then so that Heath Ledger Joker really reflects that era that he's kind of evil kind of exists within us and kind of pops up out of nowhere whereas the 2019 Joker is more of a well we need a rationale behind this there must be something to explain this even though it is evil maybe the evil is also us and maybe it is who we are I think that's also important at the same time to look at these things and say well what does each Joker say and that's the point again what does he show to say about us because really as I say the Joker's kind of a workshop test he's kind of we look at him and see ourselves in your words.
Well I could talk about your paper all day but we do have to go thank you so much Joel for talking with us Joel West his paper is The Sign of the Joker the clown prince of crime as a sign Joel thanks again for being here. Thank you so much. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast you can find more podcast episodes on the Apple podcast Spotify and Google podcast.