The three most notable film Jokers are Batman’s Jack Nicholson, The Dark Knight’s Heath Ledger, and Joker’s Joaquin Phoenix. There’s no question which one is having the most fun.
When Batman was released, critics like Mike McGrady praised director Tim Burton for eschewing camp and “taking the source material seriously.” In hindsight, it’s hard to see what they were talking about. There’s a body count that wouldn’t exist on the 1966 TV show, and the production values are noir-cool, but the heightened reality of the movie still plays more like a comedy than what we'd now call a "superhero film." Especially when Nicholson's Joker shows up to party like…like he’s Jack Nicholson with the filters off.
Ledger, like Burton and Nicholson, had comedy on his resume, but director Christopher Nolan didn't (and still doesn't). Ledger’s Joker is like Nolan's approach to movies: more into expressing ideas than hitting punchlines.
Not that he has no punchlines. His first meeting with Batman starts off with a solid gag. But after that, he spends the sequence delivering unfunny insights when he could've quipped without changing the outcome.
This Joker seems barely tethered to our reality. It seems to cost him some effort to speak, as if he’s distracted by a loud buzzing only he can hear. (Or maybe by the soundtrack?) So much of the humor Ledger and Nolan find in this performance is physical, not verbal, whereas Batman’s Joker employs both types.
Phoenix and director Todd Phillips take that “barely tethered” thing even further. Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck can barely get through the day, and though he may bring his city to its knees, it’s almost entirely by accident. A clown and aspiring comedian with multiple mental disorders, Arthur sometimes deludes himself he’s found love and acceptance. But his real life starts out bad and only gets worse until chasing chaos is his only option. His attempts at comedy are painful to watch, doomed by his own compulsive, inappropriate laughter.
If these movies were to follow the pattern of our other examples, Batman would be the most successful, followed by The Dark Knight, then Joker. But the data doesn’t back that up.
In box office, Joker slightly outperformed The Dark Knight, both joining the billion-dollar club where Batman earned not quite half a billion. Adjusted for inflation, Dark Knight takes the lead, with Batman in second place and Joker third. Batman and Dark Knight, unlike Joker, were top-grossing movies in their respective years, but Dark Knight faced stiffer competition. And while Batman had a tie-in marketing blitz the other films didn’t, that marketing centered on Batman himself, not the Joker.
In critical recognition? Joker divided reviewers, scoring 69% on Rotten Tomatoes (or not quite “fresh”) to Batman’s 76% and The Dark Knight’s 94%. But the Oscars were kinder to Phoenix: both he and Ledger won for their portrayals, while Nicholson wasn’t even nominated. In terms of total awards, the score was 28 awards and 4 nominations for Ledger, 11 awards and 21 nominations for Phoenix, and 4 nominations for Nicholson (see Wikipedia pages like this one).
In short, by no metric does Batman’s Joker come out on top, which defies the theory that funnier Jokers do better. However, The Dark Knight’s Joker usually edges out Joker’s Arthur Fleck, which supports that theory. And since Dark Knight and Joker were released in the same decade, they might be the most valid pair to compare.
Next time out: conclusions from this data—and what they mean for today’s and tomorrow’s storytellers.