15 Fan Theories About The Joker That Could Be True

From Redditor u/hokky:

So from what we see, the Joker a very smart tactician, has very good fighting skills, and also very knowledgeable of officials. This has me to speculate that he may have been a war veteran.

His superb fighting, being able to overpower a door guard, almost beating Batman, and easily making a pencil disappear might be from military training. his precise planning, from the bank heist, to the escape from the police station, even the last scene, it's all planned perfectly, might imply that he was a high ranking general or tactician of some sort. And he knows a lot about "the system," meaning he probably worked for the government, but ended up hating it. Another note, during the police burial ritual, he seemed to know what the movements were, perfectly, implying he has had some training.

Also, war has been known to make people "insane," and his strong almost painless resistance to Batman's interrogation might imply that he was a prisoner or even a hostage once.

From Redditor u/generalzee:

Joker, although a lying psychopath, is actually the hero in The Dark Knight. Before the Joker, Gotham was a mess. Entire sections of the city were closed off due to madness, organized crime ran rampant, and the majority of important city officials were wildly corrupt. The city even tolerated a renegade vigilante who ran around wearing a rubber suit.

Along comes the Joker and by the end of a very short time, almost all organized crime was eliminated, many corrupt officials were imprisoned or dead, and the city's vigilantes even went into hiding for 8 years. This was all part of Joker's masterfully executed plan.

In the end Gotham is actually clean. It wasn't because of Harvey, who died too soon to do any good, except as a martyr, and it wasn't because of Batman who was ostracized and treated like the criminal such a vigilante truly is for 8 years. Gotham was safe because the Joker had cleaned up the streets. He eliminated the corrupt police, he destroyed organized crime financially, he uplifted Gotham's spirit, and he even got rid of the flying pest that had been corrupting Gotham ever since he declared himself its protector.

[Read the full theory here]

From Quora user Patrick O'Neill:

The Joker is a force of chaos. Importantly, he is an agent of chaos for the sake of chaos. There is not a purpose or meaning to it. He is not trying to gain power. He does not want revenge. He does not want money. He is not mad at anyone. He’s not trying to impress a girl. Chaos is the point. Heath Ledger’s Joker tells two different “origin stories” in The Dark Knight. At the climax, he starts to tell a third version to Batman. “Do you know how I got these scars?” Maybe he’s even going to tell the “real” version this time.

But Batman doesn’t give a sh*t. It’s unimportant. It doesn’t matter why the Joker is doing this. There’s no logic or meaning to it. There can’t be. The very point of it is that it is senseless.

It also clearly doesn’t matter to the Joker himself. He’s telling these stories to f*ck with people. He knows that they want to impose some kind of rationality on what he’s doing. If there’s some reason for all of this, maybe you can predict what he’s going to do. But there isn’t, so he just lies about it. His “origin story” is, to him, a series of jokes that he tells to people.

[Read the full theory here]

From Redditor u/CounterReset:

In the final scene, when the Joker hums the lyrics to "That's Life" I've read a few interpretations that go pretty deep. I took it at a bit more of face value and just wondering what the general census is. It seemed to me that he said, "you wouldn't get it" to illicit her response as part of his joke, much like the way a knock-knock joke requires a "who's there." This happens as the lyrics are "I said that's life (that's life), and as funny as it may seem. Some people get their kicks stompin' on a dream." So, she responds with what I think most would expect anyone to say to "you wouldn't get it." She says, "try me." At which point he throws her to the ground and crushes her "dream" (head) by "stomping" on it, thus ending her "life." The evidence of which we see from the bloody footprints.

Obviously, the scene has a lot of layered meaning. But i got it as the joke being that the song uses the lyrics figuratively to talk about crushing dreams as something tragic, but by applying them literally he creates a dual meaning. Using it as a play on words and turning it into a joke. It so closely mirrored the jokes that leading up to his killing of Murray Franklin.

From Redditor u/badavin3

Arthur, in my theory, suffers from severe Fantasy Prone Personality disorder. Anything goes. I find it no coincidence that at the beginning of the movie when he is first with his therapist (who is a Black female), he smiles, he engages, she is nice to him, she says the things he likes to hear. Suddenly there is this female love interest (a Black female) that pops up who smiles back, engages back, etc. But, by the end of the movie, when same therapist is suddenly shutting the door to their relationship, no more talking, no more therapy, no more meds, etc. He disconnects from Sophie, and clearly her from him, to the point he wants to kill her, which as I said above, he does, but it is the therapist he kills in reality.

[Read the full theory here]

From Redditor u/Ratso27:

I've heard a fan theory that Joker was ex special forces, and a lot of that made sense to me, but parts of it never felt quite right. I propose that The Dark Knight incarnation of the Joker is a former undercover cop. I think that sometime before the movie started, he was working deep undercover for Gotham PD, investigating the mob, but the cops f*cked something up and blew his cover. He was tortured (thus the scars), and either left for dead, or something happened to prevent them from killing him, leaving him to go off to lick his wounds and plan his revenge. Because he was so deep undercover, there were only ever one or two people on the police force who knew what he looked like, and they were executed either by the mob or the Joker sometime before the start of the movie, which is why none of the police recognize him.

When he bursts onto the scene in The Dark Knight, he claims to be an anarchist, acting randomly, but in comparison to other Jokers we've seen his attacks are disproportionately focused on either the mob or the police. He's not unleashing gas onto crowds of random people, or poisoning Gotham's water supply like most incarnations of the Joker; he's fine with civilian casualties, but they're not the goal, they're just the means to an end. His goal is always to kill either the police, or members of the mob, indicating that he has a grudge against both groups.

[Read the full theory here]