joker

The joker card is a distinctly American invention, and it is remarkably recent by the standards of the standard deck. Playing cards reached Europe from the Islamic world in the late fourteenth century, and the fifty-two-card deck with four suits was standardized across Europe by the sixteenth century. The joker was added in the United States around 1867–1868, and the evidence points to Euchre — a popular American trick-taking card game — as the occasion of its invention. Euchre used a special high trump card called the 'best bower' (from German Bauer, meaning peasant or farmer, the name of the jack in German playing card tradition). When manufacturers began including an extra card in the deck to serve as the Euchre best bower, they needed a name for it. The prevailing theory is that 'joker' is a corruption of 'Jucker' or 'Euchre' — the game's name in its own variant spelling — rather than a derivative of the word 'joke.'

The evidence for the Euchre derivation includes the earliest printed examples, in which the extra card is labeled 'Jolly Joker' on some decks and 'Best Bower' on others, and the fact that the card's primary early use was as a trump in Euchre rather than as a wild card. The jester or fool figure that typically illustrates the joker — the motley-costumed clown with a cap and bells — was chosen to represent a card outside the normal hierarchy, a figure who stands apart from the court cards (king, queen, jack) while being able to outrank them. The jester image was appropriate whether the word derived from 'Euchre' or 'joke': the fool at court was the one figure permitted to mock the king, to break the rules of precedence, to be what he needed to be in a given moment.

The joker's function across different card games varies enormously, and this variation reflects the card's unstable identity as a piece outside the deck's normal taxonomy. In some games, the joker is the highest trump, outranking all other cards. In others, it is a wild card that can represent any card its holder chooses. In still others, it is a dangerous card — in Old Maid and similar games, the joker (or a designated substitute) is the card no one wants to be left holding. In some card games, jokers are simply removed before play begins, their presence in the box a vestigial courtesy. The joker is the deck's exception, the card that does not have a fixed place in the normal ordering.

The extension of 'joker' to people — the joker in a group, the wild card of a situation — follows naturally from the card's semantic identity as the outsider, the rule-breaker, the unpredictable element. 'The joker in the pack' is the person or factor that cannot be predicted and whose behavior cannot be constrained by the normal rules of the game. The word carries both the playfulness of the jester and the danger of the wild card: the joker may produce unexpected delight or unexpected disaster, and you cannot tell which until the moment arrives.