The Killing Joke Response

I had heard of The Killing Joke, but didn’t know its significance. Initially, once I figured out what story was being told, I was surprised. Up unto this point, one of the things that I had found so fascinating about the character of the joker, as that no one really knew anything about him before he was the Joker. He was the embodiment of mysterious, maddened evil, and while initially I was interested in the telling of the joker’s history, I have a feeling that the more I think about it, the less I’m going to like it. Before reading the killing joke or Detective Comics #168 in which a very similar backstory for the Joker is explored, I could theorize and imagine just how the joker came to be who he is. Each person who observed his character could come up with some sort of backstory, as unique and terrible as the next person, but now after reading his backstory, we no longer have to do that, now we no longer can do that.

From a standpoint that is looking at the killing joke as a story and only a story, I liked it for the most part. The concepts it explores are deep and dark, as they pertain to saddened insanity and psychological terror — and they are explored in a manner that is quite raw and terrifying, considering that the base of the Joker’s character is humor. The Joker’s backstory certainly gave us an opportunity to sympathize with him, to understand that he wasn’t always the way that he is today. However, in some instances, I feel like he is too great of a character, both in vast complexity and design for his backstory to be made up of essentially two major happenings. The first being the death of his wife, the second being his swim in a vat of chemicals.

Personally, if I were in charge, I don’t think I would tell the Joker’s history. But if I had to, I think I would expound upon the Joker’s backstory even further than The Killing Joke did. I would give a strand of unfortunate events that slowly led the Joker into a maddening decent, and then had his last shred of sanity stripped away from him when he fell into the toxic chemicals. I might change his backstory to make him a war veteran, a man who had to make extremely difficult decisions, a man who had to do things we could only imagine in our nightmares, a man institutionalized by the chaos of war. So overall, if I were to have a say in the Killing Joke, I would simply make it longer, more expansive, and more detailed.