A brief evolutionary history of clowns

The joker was inspired by another joker

In 1928, the movie "The Funny Man" was released. It's based on a famous novel by Victor Hugo about a misshapen "joker" who falls in love at the circus. The character has a long face, sliced-back hair that forms a sharp corner at the back of his head, and a wide grin that inspired the greatest comic book villain of all time, the Joker.

Interestingly, when the Joker was created, he wasn't a major villain. One of the authors, Bob Kane, worried that keeping the Joker alive would make Batman look incompetent, had the masked warriors in capes kill him off. But before batman was officially published, editor Whitney Ellsworth overruled Caine and forced him to assemble a panel to argue that the character should survive. The Joker then appeared in nine of the original 12 batman comics.

In the early '40s, DC Comics realized they could sell more comics if they sold them to kids. Thus, the Joker from a ruthless villain into a prankster, the dark element disappeared. In one episode, the Joker kidnaps Robin and demands a ransom from Batman. Clever Batman pays the money with a check, which the Joker actually accepts, and then he has to go to the bank to cash it, where he is arrested.

After fighting Batman for more than a decade, the Joker gradually became the most recognizable villain, and in 1951 DC finally released the Joker's origin story. Before he became The Joker, he was a comedian and later incarnated as the criminal Red Hood. Due to various accidents and blows, Red Hood fell into a chemical container, and he was disfigured and transformed into the Joker, batman's lifelong Nemesis.

Comic books got dumber and dumber, and the clowns who lacked the dark factor slipped away, and at one point almost disappeared from public view. The turning point came in 1966, when a Batman series appeared on television. Cesar Romero played a caricature clown in the play. The success of the show allowed comics to borrow this style. The joker came back from the dead, but the exaggerated style didn't last long. It didn't take long for people to get tired of this style, and fans still wanted the dark joker.

The joker's dark rebirth.

ABC canceled Batman in 1968, at the same time that the comic book series and the Joker largely disappeared from the public eye. In 1973, after a four-year hiatus, writer Dennis O 'Neill and artist Neil Adams reinvented the joker character. Starting with "The Joker's Five Ways of Revenge" in Batman # 251, the character returns to his roots as a homicidal maniac who enjoys fighting the battle of wits with Batman. This story started a trend in which the Joker was used as a central character in moderation, rather than just as a regular villain, and was the first time in history that batman and the Joker's relationship was essentially a cycle of interdependence. O 'Neill said the idea was: "To simply bring the Joker back to where it started, I went to the DC Library and read some of the early stories and tried to understand what Caine and Finger had in mind when they first wrote it." O 'Neill's 1973 story introduced the premise that the Joker was judicially judged insane, to explain why the Joker would be sent to Arkham Asylum (introduced by O 'Neill as Arkham Hospital in 1974 as batman comics) rather than prison. Adams modified the joker's appearance to give him a more symmetrical figure and elongate his chin to make him look taller and thinner.

In 1986, Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns" portrayed Batman as a retired hero with the Joker as the main villain; Since then, Batman's character has changed from hero to anti-hero, which indirectly leads to robin's death. Here Miller proposes a classic premise -- if Batman disappears, the Joker will die. If Batman returns, the Joker will return, and the joker's relationship with Batman becomes more personal, with subsequent joker stories emphasizing his own obsession with Batman. This curious transformation also sets the stage for the next leap in one of Jack Nicholson's most legendary acts: The Joker.

Batman, starring Michael Keaton and directed by Tim Burton, was released in 1989. Clowns were portrayed as villains, and Jack Nicholson did the joker job so well that his performance became the template for later clowns. It also proves that superhero movies can be a huge hit at the box office. At the time, the film grossed $251 million. Adjusted for inflation, that equates to $569 million in 2019.