So what exactly is the "Joker is super sane" theory, what does that even mean...

So what exactly is the "Joker is super sane" theory, what does that even mean? Would there be any other Sup Forums related character that could be considered "super sane" too depending on what it is?

It means he is so insane that he's actually even more sane than sane people

It's meta shit like everything Morrison does

One google search for "Grant Morrison Joker Super Sanity" later...

> In the graphic novel "Arkham Asylum," writer Grant Morrison proposed that the Joker suffered from a kind of "super-sanity" of heightened sensory perception and that he lacked a true personality of his own, adapting his psyche to whichever was the most beneficial. Morrison revisited his ideas on the Joker's sanity in Batman #663 and proposed that each time he escaped from confinement, a new personality would emerge, explaining the changes in the Joker's character through the years.

>So what exactly is the "Joker is super sane" theory, what does that even mean?
He knows he's in a comic book.

Because of this, he knows he must act in such a way that grants him relevance, which also grants him increased sustainability and life.

If he doesn't act, he dies.

It's from Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. A psychiatrist describes Joker as having "super-sanity" in the sense that his form of perception is better suited to how chaotic and difficult to predict life is at the end of the twentieth century.

>Would there be any other Sup Forums related character that could be considered "super sane" too depending on what it is?
plenty. ambush bug comes to mind
>haha modern life is so complicated!
when you had mass murderers shaking it up maybe. in terms of being able to just spend all your life happily indoors being entertained, not really. you can skip most of life entirely.

So...it's bullshit made to sound smart.

>explaining the changes in the Joker's character through the years.
> an in universe explanation for different writers
This is the type of writing Morrison does that I can't stand. I'm glad the Grant Morrison that showed up in the pages of Animal Man as killed in Suicide Squad

Or The Joker is a better actor than Clayface

I thought the joke was that Clayface was kind of a shitty actor anyway.

You sound autistic.

I always liked Dini's take on it: that Joker isn't insane AT ALL. He's a sociopath, not a psychopath, and he's figured out that if he pretends to be crazy he'll go to Arkham forever instead of federal prison and eventually the gas chamber. He's not a lunatic, he's just a monster.

That's Frank Miller's take as well. Looking at The Joker in DKR or Last Crusade it;s easy to see

He was pretty good in Arkham City.

Frank Miller's Joker was catatonic for years until he heard Batman on the news again. Catatonia is definitely mental illness.

>when you had mass murderers shaking it up maybe. in terms of being able to just spend all your life happily indoors being entertained, not really. you can skip most of life entirely.
Actually, thanks to the Internet and TV we are taking in much more information than any previous generations, the human brain isn't set up for that. The normal way of things would be to live like a peasant or go and hunt or gather your own food. Originally, all we could think about was how to survive. Nowadays we take life for granted and don't have to struggle as much in the past to survive so we shit up our brains with useless stuff.

>He's a sociopath, not a psychopath
They literally mean the same thing.

It's sometimes meant to mean that a really really cynical worldview is rational in Gotham City because Gotham is just that horrible, but I like the meta take on it that he's aware of the fact that he's in a comicbook in a villain's role and that nothing matters on any moral, ethical, practical, or spiritual level.
That seems like criminal motivation that writes itself.

I thought it meant Joker understands he is a fictional character in a comic book/movie/video game. That is the big joke and he realizes it.

There is an intended distinction in terminology there but the words have been used so interchangeably and with such vagueness for so long that whatever one word once meant is now legitimately an applicable definition for the other, and visa-versa.
It was once that one word was about being crazy and dangerous and the other was about being amoral and dangerous.
But nobody makes that distiction anymore.

I always imagined a interesting meta take on Joker would be would while he's not aware that he's comic character, he's slowly becoming more and more suspicious that he has all the perks of a serialized fictional character. He maybe will test it out by leaving fayal parts of his plans to chance, building robots too big to really make sense, pulling lamest excuses but still convincing the vengeful citizen to lower his gun long enough for the Joker to put the situation back in his favor. It fills his ego as he gets a feeling that he's too important to die.

No, the two different words are for two different ideas about how people become psychopaths. When someone says "sociopath" the implication is that they believe it's caused by social factors rather than biological factors.

never heard that before. and since the debate here is on terminology, i think that's enough to say you're wrongish?

Think of it like this.
Autists lack a level of imagination and connection to reality, social or otherwise, they're like human meat calculators.

A normal person is just kind of there on the spectrum as far as we understand ourselves.

A hyper-sane person would be like on a whole new level with understanding social moores, humans and reality. To them the entire human race would seem autistic (Repetitive, conforming and non-reciprocal).

The Joker is ultra sane.
He's like Sylar from Heroes basically, and sees the cracks in the code.

Will Joker ever archive CHIM?

It's important to note that Morrison has outright stated that Serious House on Serious Earth is in its *entirety* meant to be a dream sequence; a nightmare that Batman is having about Arkham and its inhabitants.

So, this is literally a theory being put forth by a figment of Bruce's imagination. I don't think that it needs to be taken too seriously.

>implying he hasn't

Joker's life is exactly how he wants it to be. All he does is fuck with Batman.

It almost doesn't matter what they used to mean because they're both used as pejoratives now and once a word is a way to demean the literal meaning becomes irrelevant.
"Sociopath" and "Psychopath" both just mean that it's morally, heroically, and pragmatically righteous for Batman to break all of The Joker's bones.

While both are personality disorders they have a huge difference in meaning.
A psychopath doesn’t have a conscience which in turn means he lacks self awareness. He sees nothing as wrong and his actions are based on urge and little else.
A sociopath typically has a conscience, but it’s really weak but it is there and as such gives him self awareness. He knows killing is wrong and as such is aware the possible need to be more careful in his actions.

They both lack empathy however a sociopath understands it's existence in others while a psychopath only understands himself.

But the biggest difference: A psychopath doesn't fear the consequences of his actions, a sociopath does in the sense of what happens to him. A psychopath will kill the person beside him if it calms his nerves, a sociopath might find means within reason to hurt the person without throwing himself into jail or worse over it.

You know how Dini's Joker and Morrison's joker from the same time period are like two completely different characters
I have my own theory in this
When he tried to evolve into the next personality, it just didn't work
Becuase he had been shot in the head
And so he kept oscillationg between the joker we're used to and the Manson joker from RIP
Then after batman inc was formed, he felt his role was basically over, so he went to live in the sewers in black mirror

Anyway a few things would have to be redone for this to even work, but it fits in okay I think

Some bullshit Morrison came up with because he can't have write complex stories so he just does complicated stuff to seem deeper.
Even in a very short story that's not even among his best, Moore added more depth to the Batman characters than Morrison through an entire run that span several years and series.

>You know how Dini's Joker and Morrison's joker from the same time period are like two completely different characters

Probably because he was written by two different authors

I feel like that's splitting hairs

I'm not however this term has been so generalized that it feels that way now.
It's like how people have used "Autist" as a slang for anything that seems over critical or even just obtuse. Autism is an excessive rigidity with serious detachment yet internet uses the term as a blanket word for "stop being so serious"
In similar fashion over the decades psychopath and sociopath have been thrown around as catch all for "extremely amoral actions" and as such they have bleeded together

Actually a better example is Antisocial personality disorder where people think by how the term is structured means they don't like to socialize when the disorder is someone who rebels to the laws and customs of society devoid of/or antagonistic to sociable practices. Which is far more radical then what people think but again, the word is so misused that most people think you are just saying a person wants to hide in a room all day reading books.

Except being "anti-social" has been watered down to mean anybody who doesn't have 20 friends, 3 fuckbuddies and a personal drug dealer. So somebody with 50 IRL friends would consider a person with only 3 close friends to be anti-social, and popular opinion would agree with the 50plus person. It's only truly anti-social if you have nobody for friends, family, or fucking

He's shown being aware about it in Morrison's B&R.

They're both pop culture terms at this point.

The DSM uses "antisocial personality disorder," if you're that obsessed with correct terminology, that's what you should use.

So Joker's act is all about him remaining a big draw to comic buyers, so that his creators are forced to keep him alive and relevant? And he needs Batman to stay alive too.
That's pretty meta, I love it.

> It's only truly anti-social if you have nobody for friends, family, or fucking
anti-social is when you are opposed to society. destructively so.
being a hermit is just being asocial.

this is objectively correct according to the apa

Joker knows what he's doing, he just doesn't give a fuck unless Batman is somehow involved.

i always figured he was a sociopath who wants to prove that everyone is a sociopath waiting to happen. he wants to do this by pushing bats (he sees batman as his moral opposite) over the edge that he believes is in everyone.

'super sanity' is just the writer wanting to make him seem like he's more than what he is.

If you call the Joker crazy then you can't call Bats sane either.