10 Things You Didn't Know About The Joker
6. Originally Not So Murderous
The very first appearances by The Joker saw him being just as trigger happy as the early Dark Knight was, being a straightforward spree killer that Batman was probably right to take lethal action against. With the softening of the character in general so too did the Joker get a lot less murderous, partly thanks to the newly-introduced Comics Code which dictated what you could get away with in mainstream books sold on newsstands. So no sex, no bad language, and a heck of a lot less violence than before.
Which is very different to modern depictions of The Joker. Rather than insane plots that involved him murdering a whole lot of people, the Clown Prince Of Crime instead spend the better part of twenty years doing goofy burglaries that involved silly circus-based gimmicks, like taking a clown car full of made-up henchman into banks and generally just made a nuisance of himself. Besides the censorship, there was also the worry that having a serial murderer constantly getting away with it undermined Batman a little. Not a problem now, obvs...