Arkham Asylum: Patient Files

The Joker

FULL NAME
Unknown

OCCUPATION
Professional Criminal
Terrorist

BASE OF OPERATIONS
Gotham City, Arkham City

AFFILIATIONS
Harley Quinn
Bane
Killer Croc
Mr. Hammer

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION

HAIR
Green

EYES
Green

HEIGHT
6ft

WEIGHT
160 lbs

The Joker is an insane, homicidal supervillain, and the arch nemesis of Batman. His white skin, green hair and blood red lips belied the chaotic nature that underlay his cartoonish appearance. The extremely intelligent self-styled "Clown Prince of Crime" had no superpowers beyond a capacity for incredible violence and a skill at creating deadly mayhem, and frequently concocted elaborate schemes to entrap his nemesis.

The Joker's exact origin is a mystery, barring that Batman was somehow involved. He revealed a possible story to Dr. Harleen Quinzel in Arkham Origins and to Professor Hugo Strange in Arkham City: once he had been a failed stand-up comedian who worked night shifts at Ace Chemicals in a feeble attempt to support his sickly wife and their unborn child. They died just before the night that he helped a gang of thieves from The Falcone Crime Family break into the Ace Chemicals plant, disguised as the infamous Red Hood. Batman interrupted the heist, resulting in the would-be criminal falling into a vat of unidentified chemicals. Washed out of the plant he removed his disguise to find they had disfigured his entire body, giving him chalk white skin, green hair and his face a clown like appearance. Driven insane by this series of events he embraced it, believing that the greatest joke of all is that humanity is only "one bad day" away from total insanity.

Strange refuted this story however, claiming the Joker had probably fabricated it to avoid taking responsibility for whatever his actual actions had been and noting the clown had told at least ten different origin stories during his career. Joker admitted that even he didn't remember what happened and that the various stories were inspired by a friend who once told him: "if you're gonna have an origin story, it may as well be multiple choice." It was entirely possible that this too was a lie.

Other versions of the story, told to Dr.Penelope Young, included being born in a small fishing village with thwarted aspirations of joining the circus and being the son of a police officer who was slain by the mob. The Red Hood persona, the Ace Chemical break in and Batman's presence seem to be the only consistent events in each retelling; the details of whether Batman threw the Red Hood into the vat, failed to prevent him from falling in or if the criminal jumped in to escape justice seemed to depend on Joker's mood at the time.

Even the Joker's own insanity may be called into question, as it never impeded his intelligence, ruthlessness and ambition or prevented him from mastering chemistry to produce his various toxins and gases. He may not have actually been insane, simply the purest kind of human evil. However, only a true madman could find humor in the tragedies the Joker did and he at least once suffered intense visual hallucinations, visualizing Batman as a huge, winged monster during his second defeat at the hero's hands at Blackgate.

Personality

The most definable trait of the Joker was his malevolent and twisted sense of humour. By Gotham City's standards of criminals the Joker far exceeded this, exposing the world to a more amoral and diabolical class of anarchist and psychopath. He declared no interest in money, greed or human companionship and believed that cruelty and immorality was the true inner core of humanity and that extreme acts of inhumane violence unveiled the truth of the world which was the biggest and most meaningless joke of all. His nature was such that Batman, shortly after encountering him, noted that of all of the criminals he had encountered during his two years fighting crime, even among the most extreme, he had never encountered someone like the Joker before then. Remarkably, Joker has displayed an understanding of morals but simply found them as restrictions to his own fun and his only desire being to corrupt others down to his own level of evil to prove this belief and create a legacy for himself that would never be forgotten. In the mind of the Joker, mindless anarchy, city-wide destruction, panic and uncountable deaths on a malevolent scale was "funny', with him laughing excessively enough at the carnage that it was a trademark of his, but after encountering Batman, he has made it his goal to destroy the Dark Knight's ideals and foundations before killing him, while at the same time, cherishes their rivalry as it has made his agenda and, by extension, life all the more interesting and entertaining. In large part because of his disfigured, clown-like appearance and his obvious insanity, he generally spoke with a high-pitched, flamboyant, and silly tone that sometimes stooped down to a menacing growl.

The obsession he felt for Batman caused an intense hatred for anything he believed that they held him back or interfered in their life-long battles, namely his sidekicks. His action to kidnap and torture Jason Todd (the second Robin) was not only a way to attack Batman on an emotional level but to warn him to leave his friends out of the "crazy little game of ours".
Due to his negative and nilihistic beliefs of human morality and nature, there were very few crimes the Joker did not commit, reserving no mercy to his own men who he would kill often randomly and violently with no apparent reason, simply because he found it entertaining, even murdering innocent civilians, bystanders and infants, viewing their deaths as a contributing factor to an already sick and sadistic world. The Joker's lack of interest in companionship or friendship results in him constantly abusing Harley Quinn, his loyal minion and girlfriend, attacking her out of irritation or simply for a hobby. Aside from the time he callously abandoned her after her failure to kill Batman during his siege of Arkham Asylum, he keeps her by his side because of her usefulness to him and being mildly entertaining. There were however, rare times where Joker cares about her.