The new movie Joker: Folie à Deux is now in theaters, angering a lot of fans and generally pleasing no one. It's about a man named Arthur Fleck who seems to be the Joker a lot of people remember from Batman canon: he wears clown makeup, he lives in Gotham City, he's seen as an agent of chaos, etc. But at the end of the movie, Arthur is killed by a random inmate in prison. The inmate goes on to cut his own face while laughing manically, implying that he is the real Joker while Arthur is just some random person who never ends up battling Batman. Director Todd Phillips pretty much confirmed that while Arthur is a Joker, he is not the Joker we remember:
"One of the things that people never understood about the first movie was, “I don't get it. He visits Bruce Wayne and he's 30 years older than Bruce Wayne. What kind of geriatric Joker is going to fight in the future?” I don't know if you've ever saw the script of the first movie. The first film is called Joker. It's not called The Joker, it's called Joker. And the first film under the script always said "An origin story." Never said THE origin story. It was this idea that maybe this isn't THE Joker. Maybe this is the inspiration for the Joker. So, in essence at the end of this movie, the thing you're being left with is “Wait, what is that thing happening behind him? Is that the guy?”
The big thing with Arthur, Joaquin's version of Joker, our version of Joker, he's not a criminal mastermind. It's one of the things we've always said about him, even in the first movie. And if we never made a sequel, it was just like, think what you want about what this guy turns into, but it's never any version of the Joker that we all grew up on. You know what I mean? That's just not who Arthur is. "
So Arthur Fleck is not the real Joker. So who is? The Joker has been around in comics for a very long time, first appearing in Batman #1 in 1940. But for many years, his real name was never given out. The first real push came in the 1989 movie Batman, where the Joker was depicted as a gangster named Jack Napier who fell into a vat of acid and got facial reconstruction surgery, which accounts for his distinctive appearance.
The idea that the Joker's name was "Jack" caught on, and showed up in the comics here and there over the next couple of decades. But the Joker is a slippery character by nature, sometimes lying about his backstory, so nothing ever really stuck permanently.
Then, in 2022, in Issue #5 of Flashpoint Beyond, DC did something surprising: it revealed the Joker's true full name as "Jack Oswald White." Or at least that's the full true name of one important Joker in one important universe; when you're dealing with comics, things can get knotty.
But at minimum, the idea that the Joker's original first name is "Jack" has stuck around for many years. According to DC canon, his full name is Jack Oswald White. His name definitely isn't Arthur Fleck. But knowing the Joker, it's possible this understanding will change with time.
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