The Contradictory Clown Prince of Crime

In the many stories he appears in, the Joker has a number of different, seemingly inconsistent backgrounds, from a comedian falling into a chemical vat to the leader of the Red Hood Gang. No one knows this better than the Clown himself, who famously declares in The Killing Joke that “Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another…. If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!" This chapter takes on the task of unraveling the Joker’s identity while staying true to his inconsistent nature. It offers a theory of how to best track character identity across stories-that is, when one character is the same character from one story to the next-to determine the Joker’s identity. In doing so, we show how we can understand the Joker’s contradictory past in terms of backward-branching-timelines, or multiple different ways his past turned out.