Re: The Joker

3
Perfect Cadla! Thanks a lot. :)

I copy this a selection of Pollet's article:

[...] The modern Joker, instead, has an American origin, though once again descending from Europe, in particular from Alsatia.

Officially, the Joker card was first used in the Unites States, during the second half of the 19th century, for playing the game of Euchre. This game was brought into the American continent two centuries earlier, by German or Dutch settlers; in fact, the same word "Euchre" is the English spelling of the old German term Juker, meaning "jack, knave", which later became the name of the deck's new subject, i.e. the Joker.

In this game, the most valuable cards are two Jacks (the one belonging to the trump suit, and the other one of the same colour), known in play respectively as Right Bower and Left Bower, a corruption of the German Bauer, "peasant" or "chess pawn", a name also used for the knave in older card games. Some versions of Euchre use a third Bower, called the Best Bower : the Joker was actually born to represent the latter card, although some players still prefer to use another standard subject of the deck, such as the 2 of Spades.


During the second half of the 19th century this extra card was given its present name "Joker", and by the 1880s it began to appear in Bridge decks as a standard, sometimes with a further extra blank card which could replace any of the subjects in the case they were damaged or lost. Only during the first half of the 20th century the Joker cards became two (usually one red and one black, to match the Bowers' colour, but sometimes one with colours and one in black & white). Some decks now have three, or even more.

The Joker has always been pictured as a jester, or as a harlequin, with the exception of few decks in which a fantasy subject is used (such as a local traditional feature, the manufacturer's logo, etc.), a trend which has become more frequent in recent years.

In choosing this character, the old Bower (or Bauer) was probably blended with the tarot's Fool.

And a jester is indeed an ideal personage for the crowded court of playing cards, which includes four kings, four queens and four knaves or jacks.


Besides some exterior similarities (both the Fool and the Joker wear patched clothes, feature funny faces and show informal attitudes), there is something more important that relates these two subjects.
If mental insanity once granted lunatics freedom of speech, and was even believed to bridge the gap between common mortals and heaven, in most Renaissance households the jester, often a hunchback or a dwarf, though being the least member of the court as for social rank, was also the only subject officially entitled to play with the king (or prince, or duke), to tease him, to tell him things which others could barely do without the risk of enduring serious consequences. The same glamorous clothes worn by the jester made him clearly identifiable among all other members of the court: a personage who, at the same time, was ridiculous yet outstanding, deformed yet witty.

Therefore, what both subjects share is a sharp contrast between their mortal and intellectual condition: the same imperfect human nature due to which primitive societies alienated the Fool and the Joker, paradoxically raised them to a level of metaphysical authority unreached by others, whose metaphor in games is the winning power credited to the two cards in their respective decks.
When a man has a theory // Can’t keep his mind on nothing else (By Ross)