The Joker as Imagery
The Joker is not like the Riddler, riddled with guilt and ready to give himself up through stupidly conceived riddles. But occasionally, he will provide a little more insight into his behavioral sciences than he may actually intend. Imagery is allusive, but a mind not confined by the limited imagination of law enforcement can grasp it:
“It's all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for... it's all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can't you see the funny side?”
Sick You Know What
Imagery is really the Joker’s forte. He can summarize in an efficiently delineated manner his own psychopathy through simple revelation of the depths of his depravity:
Joker: Well, it’s garish, ugly and derelicts have used it for a toilet. The rides are dilapidated to the point of being lethal and could easily maim or kill innocent little children.
Sales agent: Oh, so you don’t like it.
Joker: Don’t like it? I’m crazy for it.
The Emergency Exit
One thing psychopaths can be counted to do in fiction is wax philosophic on the subject of psychopathy. And, of course, it is never simply insanity. Madness always comes with an extra dimension of rational logic which—more’s the pity—the sane seem to easily miss:
“Madness is the emergency exit. You can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away…forever."
Memories are Made of This
Generally speaking, most people are happy to possess the ability to remember. Of course, everybody has things they would just as soon forget, but few would throw the baby out with the bathwater. The Joker, perhaps not so much:
"Remembering's dangerous. I find the past such a worrying, anxious place. "The Past Tense," I suppose you'd call it. Memory's so treacherous. One moment you're lost in a carnival of delights, with poignant childhood aromas, the flashing neon of puberty, all that sentimental candy-floss... the next, it leads you somewhere you don't want to go. Somewhere dark and cold, filled with the damp ambiguous shapes of things you'd hoped were forgotten."
