Okay, a YouTube video, professing to explain the history of all the Joker's costumes, made me mad enough to write this post. Why am I continually surprised at the shoddy scholarship on YouTube?! Why do I keep imagining that I will learn something by clicking on these videos?
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| BAH! FOOLS! |
In this case I never got past 01:10, where the video describes the Joker's original costume as "straight out of film noir gangster films".
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| This, for those of you who are not familiar with sartorial history, is incorrect. |
"Gangsters" did not wear TAILCOATS. Nor flat-topped hats, nor vests, nor wing collars, nor string ties. These are elements of clothing from 40 to 50 years earlier than the "Gangster Era".
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| Nor dress gloves. |
I get it. When you are a child every four-legged animal is "doggy" for a while, until you learn more terms and details to distinguish among quadrupeds. So, too, if you are a contemporary unstudied person, you lump together decades worth of clothing styles in a big box labelled "OLD".
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| I am more empathetic than I sound. My husband is a costume designer (his work above), and compared to HIM, what I know about clothing can't fill a thimble. |
So I will explain to you what the Joker's original outfit is meant to evoke (which would have been MUCH clearer to people in 1939). In short, the Joker is outfitted AS A CARDPLAYER.
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| Are you familiar with the Gambler, from the Injustice Society? Does his outfit look familiar? |
The hat that the Joker wears? It's not a "fedora"; it's literally CALLED a "Gambler's Hat".
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| Its top is FLAT and low, unlike a fedora or trilby. |
The string tie? Its common name is a "Kentucky tie", and it's associated with Southern cardplayers (and those who drifted to the Wild West with their style intact).
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| Such as this guy in this Western film. |
And WHY is the Joker dressed this way? It's obvious: he's coded as a CARD PLAYER.
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| John Carradine ("Stagecoach"1939) would have made an interesting Joker. |
And a sneaky one, not a good honest cowboy type, but a sneaky, sneering, aristocratic SOUTHERN one.
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| The first image of the Joker is from the splash page of his first story shows him... dealing a hand of cards. |
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| The time we see the Joker smile is when he self-identifies as a cheating card player. |
The pinstriped pants and spats...
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| Or the "stirrup" pants, another old-school element |
...are also part of the look. Everything about the Joker's outfit says "shady gambler."
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| There are some echos of the Wild West UNDERTAKER, but the hat, the color of the suit, and pants and spats undercut that association severely, leaving "gambler" the only on-target association. |
Thanks to period films and closer proximity to the era, the Southern/Western Gambler was a more familiar trope when the character of the Joker was introduced. This type of clothing (particularly in a usually "villainous" color) was really all the Joker needed to be thematically costumed.
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| With due deference to the artists of the Bronze Age, a lot is lost by outfitting the Joker in contemporary styles and there is a reason these looks don't stick (despite their effective color scheme). |
14 comments:
You know, the sartorial origins of a supervillain may objectively be one of the least important things on this earth, but this incident points to something that bothers the hell out of me: these days, people are more motivated to speak for popularity than for accuracy. To be sure, there have always been BS-ers, but there were also social mechanisms in place to push back against them, and those mechanisms seem to be gone.
I probably wouldn't have picked up on the Joker being gambler-themed, but now that you mention it, yeah I see it. But even so, I know what a fedora looks like, and the Joker's hat clearly isn't a fedora. And in gangster films, yes they wore suits, but more of the "normal" variety that the Joker's clearly isn't. The guy's argument nearly disproves itself; that takes a special kind of wrong.
Except these days, "wrong" doesn't mean much; there is only "unpopular".
- HJF1
Also, your husband does INCREDIBLE work. Great Neptune!
- HJF1
Oh hey, check out this image of a riverboat gambler. If this isn't the Joker to a tee, I'm an uncle's monkey.
https://depositphotos.com/vector/woodcut-illustration-of-riverboat-gambler-29560773.html
- HJF1
I also had never realized the Joker's traditional suit is based on gamblers, so thanks for pointing it out, Scipio. I actually wonder if this particular YouTuber, in addition to being unfamiliar with the Joker, is also unfamiliar with a deck of cards or the fact that "Joker" is modeled on playing cards, not prop comedy.
I think I may have made the "Riverboat Gambler" associations on a subliminal level (thanks to watching reruns of Maverick a few short years being exposed to Romer's Joker), but I wouldn't have been able to nail it down verbally until you pointed it out. I certainly never realized that The Gambler and The Joker shop at the same tailor!
Now that you've planted the seed in my head, I'm starting to hear the Joker's dialogue with a soft, skeevy Southern accent ...
There is a natural theatricality to most interpretations of the Joker's voice that I consider consistent with that accent. Imagine a high-energy version of Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday...
There would be worse spins on the Joker than, his crime sprees are like a high-stakes card game with Batman, and the stakes are Gotham. The Joker's in it for the highs and lows of the game, how it all can flip on the draw of a new card, or the playing of a wild card.
- HJF1
Right. He's not "addicted" to Batman; he's just addicted to gambling, which is why he doesn't seem that upset when he loses.
That's a MUCH more interesting characterization than the blood-soaked serial killer we've been stuck with for decades now.
The Card Sharp of Crime.
It honestly wouldn't change too much about how the Joker operates, except that it would curb the excesses that make him difficult to enjoy (such as eating his own face or killing people for shock value). Still just as cunning and unpredictable and dangerous, still just as given to unleashing chaos. But it would be in service to what he perceived as a game rather than murder for murder's sake.
- HJF1
Read the Joker's first story (DC writers); murder isn't a goal; it's just the ante in the game.
EXACTLY. Murder is NEVER the Joker's goal. To the Joker, life is a joke and he is the punchline. Making him a gambler is the best way to portray him.
P.S. The Joker terrifies me now that I'm older, not because of what he does, but because I'm beginning to understand WHY he does it.
The above comment was me. Just forgot to set the name.
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