While Mark Hamill is obviously best known for playing Luke Skywalker, he’s now nearly as notorious for voicing the Joker over various media for almost thirty years. Beginning with Paul Dini and Bruce Timm’s iconic 1992 cartoon Batman: The Animated Series, he’s been the go-to voice for the Clown Prince of Crime across DC’s animated features, last popping up in their adaptation of Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke. He’s so great in the role that it wasn’t a surprise that Rocksteady snapped him up as well (and Kevin Conroy) for their Arkham series.
Hamill’s voiced hours upon hours of the Joker, but when a fan trying to choose a Joker monologue to perform in a drama class got in touch with him, he was quick to choose his favorite from across those years, picking the ‘Joker’s Eulogy’ from The Animated Series episode “The Man Who Killed Batman.”
The background to the speech is that a goofy, unassuming small-time mobster accidentally kills Batman, making him a celebrity amongst Gotham’s most villainous. This quickly curdles, however, when he realizes that the Joker always dreamed of killing Batman himself.
“Do his eulogy from “The Man Who Killed Batman” by Paul Dini,” wrote Hamill. “It’s one of my all-time favorite Joker speeches. I’ve performed it a few times in public. It has all the colors in the rainbow & has the perfect ending: “Well that was fun…who’s for Chinese?!”
He’s right, it is a great bit of writing, perfectly summarizing the ways Hamill’s Joker can slide between cheerfully light and homicidal within the same line. Not to mention the flashes of rage that show his true nature underneath the showman exterior.
While Hamill has occasionally claimed he’s done with playing the villain, something always seems to bring him back to the role. Perhaps whatever Rocksteady and Warner Bros. are cooking up next will feature his dulcet tones in the role. Though frankly, his lengthy appearance in Arkham Knight took the character just about as far as he could go. Plus, the Joker is very definitely dead in the Arkhamverse. So there’s that, too.
