Can’t Sleep, Clown’ll Eat Me
David is scared of clowns. He isn’t scared of many things (Robert’s note: he says), but he is scared of those white-faced, big-shoed, grinning weirdoes. Not a deep primal fear, just a mild but persistent discomfort. Robert is not scared of clowns. Robert likes clowns (David’s note: he says). He wouldn’t hire one for a party, but he sees what clowns are trying to do.
We thought about this, and we isolated a central point:
Robert has been to the circus many times. David has never been to the circus.
Why does this matter? Surely simple exposure can’t render one grown man ill at ease with a guy in greasepaint, and the other comfortable? Well, yes and no. There’s a little more to it than that, but we think, ultimately declining circus attendance has created a feedback loop for the Joker which is seeing him drift farther and farther from his conceptual home.
Firstly, some brief words on Coulrophobia – fear of clowns. It should be noted at the outset that neither one of us holds any kind of psychology qualifications (NerdSpan’s fearless leader Dr. Travis Langley is probably better qualified to comment on all of this. Look to the comments!). Coulrophobia, however, is a neologism. It’s not recognised in the relevant literature. Like the fear of appearing naked at school, its roots are in pop culture, not academia.
Fear of clowns is easy to identify. Many people think that it’s derived from the “uncanny valley” effect. Simply put, the uncanny valley represents the unease that people feel when something is at a particular point in the range between not human and human. The almost, but not quite, human. Think of androids and aliens, think of ventriloquist dolls, and yes, think of clowns. The strange eyes. The malproportioned hands and feet. The preternaturally white face. The grimace. The silence. The… (Robert’s note: Shut up, David).
Clowns have been around in one form or another for thousands of years, but “fear of clowns” as a discrete identified phobia only really gained currency from the 1980s onwards. What changed? Perhaps catalysed by the arrest of ‘Killer Clown’ John Wayne Gacy, the collective unconscious began, almost overnight, to embrace the evil clown. Steven King’s legendary Pennywise, the Dancing Clown, from IT hit the stands in 1981, and afterwards, the evil clown leapt into stardom. Pennywise was quickly followed by Poltergeist, Killer Clowns from Outer Space, Clownhouse and KillJoy.
Clown fear became a cultural touchstone, needing no explanation beyond “the character is scared of clowns” in top rating ‘90s sitcoms like Frasier, Seinfeld and The Simpsons. Buffy had the nightmare clown of Xander’s 7th birthday. Today, Doctor Who puts evil clowns in glass boxes in the monster rotation, the Insane Clown Posse still exists, and P!nk can co-opt the image into a (terrible) pop-song.
Professor Joseph Durwin of California State University, Northridge wrote a publicly accessible essay on a lot of the above factors. This is worth a read-through if you want a detailed breakdown, with better citations than we’ve dealt with here. (We found Professor Durwin’s article after we began writing this one, but it’s certainly been of assistance. If any NerdSpan readers are at CSU Northridge, please find the Professor and give him our thanks!)
Professor Durwin notes that many people who fear clowns acquire that fear in childhood, often due to the uncanny valley effect mixed with the typical degree of aggression and transgression contained in the clown’s performance. We (respectfully) think, however, that Professor Durwin has missed a few key points – though they lie between the lines of his essay. The flare up of clown fear didn’t just happen. The 1980s, as an era, marks the coming of age for the baby boomers. Not only did the burgeoning middle class of the Atomic Age hire children’s party clowns, making them a ubiquity and bringing them into the home, but it was in the boomers’ childhoods that television clowns like Bozo, Cliffy, Ronald McDonald and the Town Clown on Captain Kangaroo became omnipresent. These TV entertainers were far more often experienced alone, unmitigated by hundreds of other laughing children or by a general nostalgia for the circus’ many other positive features. They were just there, looking for one-on-one time with you. Is it any wonder children of that generation grew up with their fears surviving to adulthood intact?
People are scared of all kinds of things, but fear of clowns has become common enough to be a media darling, along with spiders, snakes and the dark. The effect is self-reinforcing. If fear of clowns is acquired by a certain percentage of people who encounter clowns, once mass exposure to clowns goes up, the number of people who have a fear of clowns also goes up. Run an informal, anecdotal survey of people under 30. Their vision of clowns will be almost always as figures of disquiet and horror. Even when they’re presented in a humorous context, the most common bit for that presentation is laughing at someone’s fear of the clown. Who, honestly, finds a clown an innocent figure of fun anymore?
The inversion of the symbolism of the clown has become permanent. The clown’s dark alter is now its primary.
And that presents a real problem for the Joker.
The Joker is notably absent from Professor Durwin’s essay. That’s particularly odd given that he didn’t discount comics – the Violator from Spawn is cited as an example of the link between the clown and the supernatural, and that’s a much less common reference point. Part of what may have led to the Joker’s absence, and certainly a critical factor for this analysis, is that he predates the 80s’ clown panic.
The Joker debuted (twice!) in Batman #1. The story was published in 1940. The character’s appearance was reminiscent of Conrad Veidt from The Man Who Laughs, based on a tale from Victor Hugo of Les Miserables fame. Where Gwynplaine was a tragic figure, the Joker was a master criminal from the outset. Disputes about the origin and the accreditation of the Joker abound, but both Gwynplaine and the other potential antecedent of the Joker, the picture on the 52-deck ‘wild card’, take their imagery from the archetypal clown.
In the heyday of Batman’s formative years, the juxtaposition between Batman and his arch-nemesis, the Joker, was as innovative as it was intense – a hero that dresses as a monster, trapped in a never-ending battle against a monster appearing as an entertainer of children. Within his first year, the rictus grin of his first appearance remained, but more and more, the Joker was given a delight in theatricality to match his appearance, borrowed from then-contemporary clowns and vaudevillians. As it slowly emerged that unlike the other costumed crooks, his gimmick was his true face, he gained his trademark Joker compound, giving him the literal power to share the laughs, an obsession with flashy crimes and a track-record of seeming to die each time he matched skills against the Caped Crusader.
During the Dick Sprang years, the Joker stole giant toys and made flying big-tops. He had helicopters that fired lemon meringue pies and like an ersatz Riddler (though many would call the Riddler of the era an ersatz Joker) came up with puzzles, usually based on puns, for the Dynamic Duo to solve. He was regularly referred to as the Clown Prince of Crime, known as much for his jokes as his mayhem. Cesar Romero played a high camp Joker, mugging straight out of a pantomime. He was a ridiculous figure for a(n awesomely) ridiculous show. The jokes from the 50s through the late 60s (when he appeared – 1964 onwards was a sparse stretch for the Harlequin of Hate) were always at least intended to be funny, even if by adult standards of today they fall flat. (Or are unintentionally hilarious, if puerile).
The Joker veered back towards homicide in the 70’s but even then he never lost the sense of whimsical imagination that defined him. When the Joker returns to murder in Denny O’Neil’s legendary Joker’s Five Way Revenge, his crimes were classically comedic. One of the most famous stories from the era – The Laughing Fish – sees the Joker attempt to copyright a Joker’s rictus grin forced onto the face of the local marine life. Mad, clearly, and perhaps not well-versed in intellectual property law, but undeniably a crime reminiscent of a clown’s performance, a show demanding a certain audience appreciation.
(Authors’ Note: This image was taken from the Batman: The Animated Series adaptation of ‘The Laughing Fish’)
The same way Batman’s terrible visage was meant to face his cowardly and superstitious foes in the criminal underworld, the Joker’s villainous escapades created the sort of manic voyeuristic joy that make sane, healthy people wear t-shirts with Charles Manson quotes and go to Insane Clown Posse concerts. The Joker wished to be the greatest performer in the world, his goals and his methods ultimately selected to hold his audiences attention. Batman, who as year succeeded to year became an increasingly dour figure, as grim under his mask as he seemed to be to those outside it, was contrasted in the madcap nature of the Joker, who would be dealing out the bon mots even as he went down, the victim of a congenital glass jaw condition. In short, the Joker stood apart from the everyday crooks as Batman’s equal and opposite, reflecting Batman’s private crusade for order with an equal and absolute devotion to public and amusing chaos.
Two cultural movements coincided in a way that would fundamentally alter the Joker’s trajectory. The first was the shift in the role of the clown in the popular consciousness. The removal of clowns in popular culture as anything other than figures of fear robbed the Joker of part of his fundamental contrast with Batman. Instead of a dichotomy between the man dressed as a monster and the monster dressed as a figure of fun, you had two equally terrifying images clashing against the Gotham skyline. In point of fact, although DC was careful always to emphasize that the spectre of Batman remained generally terrifying to the criminal population, there was, as there surely must have been, a crossover point at which, to the reader, “murder-clown” became darker and more ominous than “dude in a cape and tights”. Artists clearly registered this through cultural osmosis, and representations of the era increasingly emphasised the pallid skin and maniacal eyes over the more “clownish” elements of his appearance. The Joker’s hair changed from a wig-like pompadour into a slick 80s short back and sides. The purple pinstripe remained, but became simultaneously tatty and stylish, the bowtie and gloves turned from oversized cartoonish accessories into more streamlined adornments.
The second movement was the introduction of elements of “realism” to Batman’s world. More so than perhaps any other comic (certainly more than any other DC comic), the Batman of the 1980s celebrated a return to the elements of the vigilante drama. A hard man, fighting a hopeless battle against the backdrop of the mean and windswept streets of what could only be Koch-era New York. Frank Miller redefined Batman at both his Alpha and his Omega, as a man in a costume, vulnerable to street thugs dropping televisions on his head and the sweet kiss of hot lead to the ribs, even when he had Batman beating up SWAT teams and wrestling Superman. Extraordinary features of Batman’s milieu needed to be explained, categorised and reduced in order to fit a fantasy of attainability. Not life as we know it, but an approximation thereof. Perhaps more than any other era, the solo Batman title of the ‘80s operated at a divide from the rest of the DCU. This meant that the continued costumed theme villainy that still defined many other heroes of the age (though Batman’s trends would spread, as they always have) needed some psychological explanation.
Two archetypal stories of the era, often assessed as the Joker stories – The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke – distanced the Joker from his carnival roots. The former depicted him as a glittering celebrity killer, David Bowie on a rampage as a form of a bloody valentine to Batman. The latter depicted him as a stand-up comic turned reluctant gangster, a cautionary tale of an ordinary man driven mad by a cycle of violence beyond his control or comprehension. Both were a significant distance from the whimsy that had previously gone into the character’s core. Part of this emphasis on psychological motivations forced examination of the Joker’s particular pathology, albeit in pop psychological terms. Robbed of his outlandish ambitions, his focus in these stories shrank from “the world” to Batman and members of Batman’s inner circle, including the first two Robins and the Gordons. He also backed away from his plethora of themed gadgets. When he ended Dick Grayson’s career as Robin by shooting him with an ordinary gun, the character became associated with a simplicity of method that has never gone away, and when he later echoed this stunt to (seeming, if not actual) greater success by picking up a crowbar to repeatedly bash Jason Todd, the association became indelible. Today, we have a Joker with “nothing in his pockets but knives and lint”.
The clown had all but vanished, and the “clownish” elements that did remain became a trapping of monstrosity, associating the Joker with the wider ‘Evil Clown’ motif. That which had made the Joker distinct had become commonplace. The Joker became less a figure of comic, egocentric, extroverted mania and more a god of serial killers, a figure to haunt the edge of nightmares. The Joker’s death obsession grew more pronounced. He became defined by brutal murder sprees, attempting to outdo not only the other villains in Batman’s ever-growing Rogue’s Gallery, but also the pop culture of evil clowns which surrounded him. Successive writers attempted to enthral the audience by upping the scale and consequently the monstrosity of the Joker from the author before them.
Where does this lead us? To a Joker with his bloody ruin of a face strapped on with a belt, leaping from the shadows with bloody knives, cutting a swathe through Gotham by implied surgeries and exploding two-headed kittens, all designed to push Batman to the breaking point.
Although that’s a summation of events in the latest Death of the Family arc in Batman, this isn’t a dig at Scott Snyder. This march through the horror gallery has become the archetypal Joker story, and as an example of that, Snyder’s is meticulously researched, skilfully penned and sure-footed in achieving precisely what it sets out to do – drawing back the curtain on Batman’s obsession with the Joker, pleasurably turning the stomachs of his audience in the process.
Death of the Family does that, and it is compelling. But to achieve that effect, we’ve already reached a point where Snyder needs to posit as uninterrogated premises that the Joker can survive indefinitely without a face, corral key members of the Rogue’s Gallery as day-labour, administer (and seriously remodel) Arkham Asylum for a year with nobody noticing, access radioactive isotopes and reliably predict he can kidnap the entire Bat-family on a very tight schedule.
This escalating narrative is as exhausting as it is limiting. Although writers of different skills and abilities will create stories of varying quality in that oeuvre, there comes a point where necessarily, it will become played out. The degree of Grand Guignol needed to shock the audience only ever goes up and it runs the risk of reaching the point where the suspension of disbelief is stretched to its breaking point. Any story which seeks to further elevate the stakes becomes increasingly likely to be predictable and/or ridiculous; any story which lowers the stakes back to more reasonable levels will have difficulty captivating the jaded audience.
The now well-worn trope of the Murder Clown forms a straight-jacket for the character. The more this story is associated with the Joker, the more it becomes the only kind of Joker story you can tell. Down this circular path, the cape-and-cowl superheroics become pro forma, symbolising nothing greater than what appears on the page. The Joker commits a crime as the first stage of some plan with no greater payoff than gaining Batman’s attention. The first crime succeeds so as to build some heat. Batman ostensibly stops the plan from reaching fruition, but since he gives the Joker the attention he wants, it is no defeat to be returned to his spiritual home of Arkham, from which even the wardens know he can handily escape when he once again feels the need for the ministrations of Batman’s fists.
Far from Batman’s resplendent nemesis, this formulation describes Batman’s unpleasant distraction. Worse, it describes a set-up without narrative tension. Increasingly untethered from any wider context, the stakes of any story involving the Joker became increasingly confined. Emphasising of the Joker’s obsession with Batman certainly allows for some riveting psychodramas, but it removes the scope for that fundamental building block of the Joker’s villainy: an ambition that Batman thwarts. Knowing that the Dark Detective’s hands are tied by his unwillingness to kill, there is nowhere for Batman to escalate to, and nothing more the Joker wants. The Joker can be given continually more abominable crimes, but the modern, cynical comic book reader knows that whilst the details may change, true upheavals are elusive. They will return to the dance forever and ever, because the Joker demands no stake other than entanglement with Batman’s life. It is inconceivable for the Joker to ever win, but equally impossible for him to ever lose. The catharsis of good’s triumph over evil is placed out of reach.
Snyder’s work even showcases an acute awareness of this, with the writer finding it effectively impossible to provide a resolution equal to his story. The suggestion that the aforementioned pro forma superheroics had ended and Batman was ready to end the Joker for good is half-hearted, even ambiguous, and culminates in one more nod to the early Joker tales stories, proffering a tongue-in-cheek semi-suicidal drop reminiscent of Reichenbach Falls. In other words, aware that this cannot actually be the final Joker story (and boy, it would have made a great final Joker story if taken to its hinted conclusion) but equally aware Batman cannot just remit the Joker to Arkham for another round, Snyder ends with the Harlequin of Hate vacating the stage with another apparent death. We, the readers, are, as always, left standing there with Batman on the cliff’s edge, looking out over the chasm of the Joker’s yawning conceptual emptiness.
Perhaps this is why the most innovative uses of the Joker have been those that take him out of this space altogether. The Joker’s appearances in Batman: The Animated Series recapture the magic of the Silver Age Joker without resorting to the high camp ludicrousness. Even without the freedom of storylines set up truly for adults, episodes like Joker’s Favour, Joker’s Wild and Harlequinade are a best-of-show reel of these sorts of Joker stories. Paul Dini later took the Joker back to his roots in Detective Comics, penning a story where the Joker went off-stage for several months, disguising himself as an emo stage magician in order to commit a singular and particularly theatrical murder – a virtual impossibility for a no-faced serial murderer with a speech impediment. Grant Morrison used him to great effect by putting him to open war with Batman’s enemies instead of Batman himself, climaxing with a series of Batman/Joker team-ups. Perhaps the best Joker story of all time, Soft Targets from Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker’s Gotham Central, is one where Batman barely features. The premise involves the Joker shifting to a playing field and goal completely independent of Batman outside of his role as protector of Gotham, blending the simplicity of method we’ve come to expect of the Joker with a particularly clever frivolity-themed crime that requires nothing more than a unique perspective. It also has a lethal dose of jet black irony, the kind that, with the distance of fiction, is darkly amusing.
(Authors’ Note: This isn’t from Soft Targets, but when was the last time you saw the Joker this human?)
What these stories have in common is that they showcase not a near-metaphysical incarnation of bloody-handed madness, but rather an artist with the faculty to reinvent his modus operandi without abandoning his distinctive style. Variation, rather than escalation, should be the heart of the Joker’s ability to strike fear into even the bravest hearts of the DCU. In a Rogue’s Gallery crowded with twelfth-level intellects, immortal eco-terrorists, super-powered psychopaths and body-count-crazy killers, the Joker can only stand out, not by being a god of slashers and serial killers, but as the villain best embodying a diabolical imagination. His ability to veer from the ruthless to the madcap, from the charming performer to the stone cold killer, all within the context of his motif, should create a sense that the Joker could turn up anywhere, doing anything. The Joker doesn’t have much of that anymore, unfortunately. The ultimate wild card has become a predictable gambit: devastating in the right hands, but in the final analysis capable of taking only one trick.