But even at the character’s softest, there was rarely any effort to inject any sympathy into the Joker, whose mysterious background was part of his mythos. In the 1960s, when the Adam West–starring Batman TV series aired on ABC, the Joker was a goofy sideshow, a cackling trickster played by Cesar Romero (who famously refused to shave his mustache for the role, instead painting white makeup right over it). By then, DC Comics’ editors had decided that Batman’s recurring villains shouldn’t be allowed to kill with impunity, since that reflected poorly on the Caped Crusader’s ability to fight crime. While always sporting his signature clown makeup, he functioned first as a gangland spree killer in the 1940s, and was then softened to more of a gimmicky nuisance in the 1950s. 1 (1940), the villainy of Batman’s archnemesis fluctuated between chillingly ruthless and harmlessly goofy. For the first few decades of his existence in the world of comic books, the Joker wasn’t a particularly tragic character.
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