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Marialuigia Ruffo

Prof. Pierpaolo Sarram

CMS 318

17 November 2014

The Killing Joke: Sanity vs. Insanity

This paper explores the representation of madness and sanity in the graphic

novel The Killing Joke written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland,

published by DC Comics in 1988. The story explores the unusual and complex

relation between Batman and the Joker and, through flashbacks, it investigates an

aspect of the Joker’s life, since now unknown, which is his past and the way he has

become who he now is. I will attempt to demonstrate that one important theme – often

communicated indirectly – is that both madness and sanity are present in the two

characters, Batman and the Joker, as amply supported by the dialogues between them

and by the ambiguous end of the graphic novel. In fact, this episode both debunks the

myth of Batman as the sane character and Joker as the insane one by revealing

Batman’s insane and dark side and the Joker’s reasonable and logical reflection about

life.

Batman and the Joker share something in common: each has a very tragic past

—or a “bad day”, as called by the Joker—but they chose to face it in opposite ways.

Batman, after having witnessed his parents’ homicide, made the decision to “live by

the book” and fight against the crime. The Joker, who, as shown in the comic book,

was once a “normal” person, after having experienced the lost of his wife and child,

came up with the conclusion that life is pointless. Life plays jokes on people and,

therefore, it should be seen and lived as such: a joke. Throughout the history of

Batman’s comic books, the choices they have made and the way they conduct their

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lives lead the readers to consider Batman to be the sane character, while the Joker the

insane one. The Killing Joke puts into question this belief and it makes the readers

doubt on Batman’s sanity and the Joker’s insanity.

The Joker’s is again escaped from Arkham Asylum. He breaks into

commissioner Gordon’s house and he shoots to his daughter Barbara in front of him

with the intention of making him experience a “bad day” and proving that this

experience can change the life of a normal person, as commissioner Gordon is—or of

the “average man”, as the Joker refers to him at page 37—, driving one crazy, as it has

happened to him. The Joker, then, kidnaps the commissioner and closes him into a

cage located in an abandoned amusement park he has acquired, where deformed and

socially outcast people live in. Batman intervenes with the purpose to save the

commissioner and defeat the Joker once for all. The last dialogue between the two

main characters makes the reader reflect on their personalities thanks to the Joker’s

observations about Batman’s life and life in general. This dialogue leaves the reader

perplex by suggesting an almost upside-down view of the whole story. Is Batman

really mentally sane? And is the Joker insane? Or both, sanity and insanity, resides in

the two of them?

Being exposed to flashbacks where the Joker’s remembers his very last days

as a normal person before he became the Joker, the reader sees him as a real human

for the first time and this makes one sympathize with him. Interesting is Brian

Bolland’s use of colors in the flashbacks illustrations. The panels are dominated by

black and white, but each of them has a red detail in it. The red could symbolize an

alarm bell. It does not predict anything positive. In fact, it warns the reader something

worrying is about to happen and it prepares one to face the raw and sad true about the

Joker’s past.

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As narrated by his flashbacks, the Joker was once a failure comedian married

to a woman he was really in love with and who was pregnant. They did not have

enough money to pay the house rent and they did not know how they would have

raised their child once born. Because of the desperation caused by that hard period he

was going through, the Joker accepts to help two criminals to rob a card company.

They need his help to have access there because, to get to the card company, they

should pass by the chemical plant where the Joker once worked. Therefore, he would

guide them through the path. But, the same day, before the crime took place, the

police inform the Joker his wife is dead and with her also their child. Being too late

for him to draw back from the established crime, he meets the criminals to accomplish

his duty. The presence of an uncalculated security guard generates chaos: Batman

arrives to help the police and the “still human” Joker jumps into a chemical pound

lock to escape and, once he emerges from that filthy water, he takes Joker’s aspect, as

we all know him.

That “bad day” explains his apparently insane attitude. The reader, after

getting to know his past, feels his pain. Even though one does not justify all the

crimes he has committed, it is possible to see him not just as an insane figure that

draws pleasure by making people suffer in absurd ways without any valid reason, but

also as a hurt person life has played a tough joke on without him deserving it. The

Joker was a sane person before his personal tragedy, but, after it, the acceptance of

human life as insane was his only sane choice.

At page 25 the Joker himself affirms memory is dangerous. One bases reason

on memories but is often unable to face memories because they also reflect the

irrationality of life and demonstrate that life is insane. Therefore, the Joker shows that

his unfair and pointless past have triggered his insane attitude and the memories of it

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keep triggering his approach to life. Accepting insanity is a logical response:

“Madness is the emergency exit.”

It is possible to notice the strong impact the Joker’s memories have on him

not only by the dialogue, but also by the way the story is narrated. The series of the

Joker’s flashbacks are inserted in the narration every time he performs some evil or

apparently senseless action during the present time of the story. The first flashback

comes when he hypnotizes the man he should acquire the amusement park from, in

order to get it for free. At page 10 of the comic book, the Joker hypnotizes him and

his flashbacks begin at page 11 and 12 where he remembers how depressed he was

and how his wife was his only safety anchor who was always smiling to him and

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laughing at his jokes giving him hope and relief. The second flashback occurs at page

19 and 20 after the Joker shoots at Barbara and he reminds the moment he decided to

make the deal with the criminals, even if reluctantly, seeing it as the only way to

escape from his miserable condition. The memory of his wife and child’s death is

shown at page 26 and 27of the graphic novel after the Joker kidnaps commissioner

Gordon trying to make him experience a “bad day” that would, according to him,

change his life. The last flashback appears at page 33, 34, 35, and 36. It shows the

Joker’s transformation and it displays how he accidentally jumped into the filthy

water that turned him into the Joker. The flashback comes into the Joker’s mind when

he, after having talked to commissioner Gordon and having explained to him how life

is pointlessly cruel and random, send the commissioner into the cage he was

previously locked into to make him reflect about the injustice of life. Therefore, the

way the flashbacks are presented suggests how the Joker’s past has affected his life

making him become the person he is now, both physically and mentally, and how it

still determines his way to face life and his point of view about life itself and the

human condition.

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As displayed at page 37 of the graphic novel, right after his last flashback, the

Joker affirms: “Human existence is mad, random, and pointless, one in eight of them

crack up and go stark slavering buggo!” Also, he states: “Who can blame them? In a

world as psychotic as this any other response would be crazy.” Being no moral

solution to tragedy, the only way to survive is: “If life treats you bad, don’t get even,

get mad!” The Joker’s insanity is questioned. In fact, if one disregards the graphic

representation of the Joker and focuses on what he says, he seems to be an intelligent

and sane intellectual who has carefully studied and observed life – in particular,

human society – and has come to a series of reasonable and logical conclusions to

support his thesis that the world is, in fact, insane, “a joke”.

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In opposition to the Joker’s point of view about how to face life there is

Batman’s one. Batman strongly believes life has to be lived “by the book”, that is to

say by what rules and law teach. Criminals have murdered his parents, therefore

criminals have to be punished. At a first sight, there would be no reason to cast doubt

on what Batman considers to be the right way to live life, but, if one analyzes

Batman’s personality more into the deep, some question on his sanity could be raised.

For example, Batman’s secret headquarters can be seen as the insane side of Batman’s

life. His above-ground residence represents the home of a wealthy and respectable

law-abiding citizen while his below-ground residence represents the center of

operations of a “flying rat” (as the Joker refers to him at page 42) who is obsessed

with evil – and who, in fact, believes that the forces of law and order are not sufficient

to deal with the insanity and evil in the world.

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The maniacal and out of the common attachment Batman has for the “living

by the book” philosophy does not allow him to kill the Joker. In fact, when, at page

47, he has the chance to defeat the Joker once for all and the Joker himself ask him

why he is not killing him, Batman answers by saying “Because I’m doing this one by

the book… and because I don’t want to” Batman’s intention is to “sort this bloody

mess out”. He wants neither to die nor to kill the Joker. He wants to help him. In fact,

Batman proposes the Joker to work together to rehabilitate him and he also tells him

that he is not alone. Batman sees in the Joker a possibility of deliverance. Probably he

also knows the Joker’s mind is not completely gone and some sanity still resides

inside of him. He just needs someone to help him to abandon his conception of life as

insane and bring him closer to a more sane vision of it.

But, who is the Batman to tell the Joker how life should be lived? As the Joker

reminds him at page 42, Batman also has had a “bad day” that changed his life and

drove him crazy making him become Batman. Otherwise, why would he dress up like

a “flying rat”? At page 42 the Joker affirms: “All it take is one bad day to reduce the

sanest man alive to lunacy.” The Joker accuses Batman to be as insane as he is, just he

does not want to admit it. “Batman is just as fragile and mentally unstable as the

Joker. He has just as many toys and is just ad keen on playing dress up. He just

happens to fight for the good side.”(1) Therefore, Batman and the Joker are nearly the

same but they deal with their insanity in opposite ways: once fighting against the

crime, the other one supporting it. Also, while the Joker recognizes it and he appears

to be comfortable with the idea of being mad, Batman cannot face the truth denying it

to he himself. This diminishes even more his credibility as a sane person. They both

need to rely on their theatrical persona in order to go on with their lives and in both of

them madness and sanity coexist and are mixed up together becoming a unique

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mental state that makes it hard to understand where the madness begins and where the

sanity ends, and vice-versa.

This confusing and confused mental state Batman and the Joker share

culminates in the last page of the comic book, where graphic representation shows

that Batman is finally laughing hysterically, out of control, just like the Joker at a

Joker’s joke that is, ironically, about two mad people. Both appear insane. This is all

the more significant as this is apparently the first and only time Batman has laughed at

a joke. As we can see in the last panel, the white line on the asphalt road, made by the

light of the police car, disappears, symbolizing that sanity and insanity form one

dichotomous whole. The patch of dirt that extends from the Joker’s side of the white

line over onto Batman’s side seems to be saying that sanity is indeed contaminated

with insanity and that the idea of a complete separation of the two is unreal. The

image then zooms in on that image of impurity, of insanity invading the sacred space

of sanity. The final image appears to be yet another zoom, which visually eliminates

the separation between sanity and insanity that was symbolized by the white line, as if

to say that sanity and insanity are mutually inclusive and each cannot exist without the

other.

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Did Batman – as many readers imagine – kill the Joker, temporarily going

insane, that is, abandoning his own “sane” values, to do everything “by the book”? Or

did he walk away, unable to fight the Joker after sharing his joke about two insane

people, that is, accepting the Joker’s insanity as normal to some extent, perhaps even

accepting that he himself was not only sane but also insane? Would Batman have

said, “That joke really killed me!”?

To conclude, if one pays close attention to the very first and the very last panel

of the comic book, it is possible to realize they are exactly the same: drops of rain that

fall on an already wet floor creating circles. What would this mean? Maybe that

Batman and the Joker’s conflict will never end. The concentric rings of rain

symbolize the vicious and endless circle the two characters are subjected to. “The

ultimate Batman/Joker story is precisely that it never ends, that the circus carries on,

that these two clowns in costume, these funhouse reflections of each other, will

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continue their endless dance as others die around them.”(2) Probably, Batman will

keep denying to himself his past has deviate him making him hiding behind his alter

ego instead of facing life as a normal person does, but, he will always fight for the

good side. On the other hand, the Joker will never forgive life to have played that

terrible and undeserved joke on him and he will keep living in this state of conscious

madness as a way to escape from the randomness and pointlessness human society is

subjected to. The blurred line between sanity and insanity will keep dwelling in both

of them without finding any possible resolution.

Works cited:

1)Carreiro, Remy. “Five Moments That Prove Batman Is As Insane As The Joker.” Unreality Magazine. Unreality Magazine, 23 May 2012, 11am. Web. 16 November 2014. http://unrealitymag.com/index.php/2012/05/23/five-moments-that-prove-batman-is-as-insane-as-the-joker/

2)Will Brooker. “Right, Wront, and In Between: The Killing Joke” “Sequart Organizzation” Sequart Organizzation, Sat 21 September 2013. Web. 5 Dec 2014 http://sequart.org/magazine/29837/right-wrong-and-in-between-the-killing-joke/

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