Evil laughs at its own jokes

It never fails.

Whenever he laughs, we do not. His jokes never make any sense, at least in our innocent minds.

Blood makes us squirm, not smile.

Pain makes us scream, not giggle like a psychopath. Though, I suppose, if one’s life sucks and the only way to make emotional pain disappear is to shove pencils into others brains and blow up bystanders, then laughter doesn’t seem so out of place.

In fact, wherein reflecting upon this (and please pardon the warped supposition, for there is a plausible explanation) the Joker’s bloodthirsty brutality and selfish disparagement for the sanctity of human life do not make him a purely evil villain, but rather a misunderstood one.

While a child is born with the predisposition to sin, he is by no means desirous of implementing agony upon others, nor does he seek to discover a longing for passion amidst such pain. If anything, personal experience of torture and a lust for revenge brings about a conscious that feels nothing.

Heretofore, good overcomes evil, but when malice rips through life, wickedness is accordingly compensated for the uprightness inside a person. Hence, the Joker was not always a villain. He was engineered to become a desperado through abuse and a life without joy.

Obviously the Joker was a man who boasted of being not of sound mind and body, yet he turned a town into his own personal and eldritch version of hell, which by no means was the easiest of tasks to complete.

Such an undertaking requires careful planning along with the ability to cloak the inner sense of morality and make manifest the tendency to express an intense hatred. It was a rather strange goal to mark off his to do list, but nevertheless the Joker did it “well” and with pleasure, which begs a question some might not think to ask: Why?

Yes, one word, yet a thousand questions flow out of it in an overpowering manner. Why does he love pain? Why does he want to destroy everything good? Why do the tales of how he received the scars never match up? Why does he paint his face in a pattern that would haunt his victims’ dreams for years? None have a solid answer, for the Joker is an enigma, only being predictable in the fact he tends toward conveying unpredictability. Yet, it is my intention to dissect his conscious state and soul, or whatever is left of both.

I am utterly convinced the Joker loves clowns; he looks like one voluntary and seems to delight in the fact. Yet, it goes beyond a strange fetish for something that defies normalcy and scares little children. Whether intentional or not, he is covering his scars, which run in a brutal fashion along both of his cheeks, making it appear he is grinning from ear to ear.

Literally.

Whoever did that to him wanted him to suffer and bear a reminder of his pain for the rest of his life.

When all you can see is the face of a clown, no one thinks of the face beneath it. It distracts from the Joker’s inner suffering. The black around his eyes hides it well. So, what’s more intriguing would be the capability to express familiarity with the scars under the scars; the ones that cover his heart and shredded through his mental state. No one can shut off emotion entirely, no matter how hard he tries.

The Joker was abused at some point in his life, and he could not handle it. So he sought a way out of his emotional agony in mimicking what had happened to him. Instead of being a victim, he was the one in control. No one could hurt him. The Joker could unleash on others what had happened to him and feel as though he was contributing to the justice he was cheated out of.

Unfortunately, his past is never mentioned in great detail, yet it might not be hard to conjure up a story and be accurate in its validity. It’s in the stories he tells about his scars. The reasons his facial disfigurements were given to him are all different, yet in a sense are all the same; they were inflicted upon him by those who should have loved him the most. He grew up knowing pain and lacking love. You can’t give what you don’t have, only what you do. The Joker couldn’t love because he possessed none, but he had enough pain to pass around. People couldn’t connect with him because they had joy and purpose for greater things. Who would want to sit and try to understand or befriend a man who spent his pastimes killing people or laughing at things that were by no means amusing? If someone had taken the time to help him and show him there was more to life that was good and pure, perhaps he might have never been the Joker.

He wouldn’t know what it meant to be misunderstood.

At this point I am inclined to believe you think me a simpleton, or perhaps a mad one, for rendering the line between good and evil a gray one, but I have made my psychological argument. Besides, who are you to comprehend my ideology and know if I truly believe what I am writing? Perhaps I am merely filling up space with meaningless words and challenging your “in the box” way of thinking; you do need to get out more and ponder over works bearing contradictions and paradoxes.

And after all, “let’s not blow this out of proportion,” as the Joker would say.

Though said in the context of a ruthless desire to wreak havoc, it was the only intelligent statement he ever made. While I lack the bombs attached to an ostentatious and garish outfit to make the proper pun, I rather like the phrase. I believe I will use it more often.