Ever heard of "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge," "The Laughing Fish/Sign of the Joker," "Happy Birthday, Dear Joker!", the short-lived Joker series where he commits murder in 7 out of the 9 issues? Yes, he was about much more than the killing (before lesser grimdark writers had a go at him), but a killer he definitely was.

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Yeah, he was a mad killer pretty consistently from O'Neil/Adams onward. The degree of flamboyance varied, all the way up to a huge cake with explosive candles, but murder was always the intent.

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The earliest Joker stories in the 40s were mysteries where the plot revolved around Joker announcing someone would die, and the authorities and Batman attempting to protect them while the Joker found a way to get to them anyhow. The character has been a murderer from day one.

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His body count was still imaginable. Nowadays, how many grains of sand in the beach?

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If one leaves out imaginary stories (like TDKR, where he kills all those boy scouts) I think it would be well within countability, and probably not higher than low triple digits. Consider that in The Killing Joke, I believe that he only kills one person in the whole book.

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Last Laugh alone probably gave him a kill-count in the millions considering some of the things he was doing.

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And also limiting the count to things that he does personally, rather than causing to be done. (So nothing done by his minions or Harley, nothing done by the Jokerized villains.)

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Cutting out deaths caused by his minions while they're executing his schemes seems rather arbitrary. They're still dead as a direct result of Joker's actions.

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