Dear Mark,
I would like to know what the meaning is of the
picture on a joker from a deck of cards. The joker
has his finger on his nose in a conspiratorial manner.
Any information on the joker would be appreciated.
George K.
According
to my go-to Guy on such trivial twaddle, Blackjack (who
knows everything about anything, SQUARED), paper money
and illustrated cards appeared at about the same time
historically (around 900 AD, in China and Korea) and
may originally have been one and the same.
Cards were used first for divination and later for gambling.
Playing cards were common in the Orient and in Arabic
lands before they
were known in Europe,
where they may have arrived in the pockets of warriors
returning from the Crusades. Certainly, they were
well known in Europe by the end of the 1300s. (Neither
Dante nor Chaucer mentions playing cards-possibly
an indication that they were unknown to Europeans
in the 1200s, and unknown in England as late as
the middle 1300s.)
The cards brought in from oriental sources were
divided into suits and numbered but had no pictures.
Cards with pictures on them were first made in Italy
and were used in fortune telling as well as gaming.
They were the Tarot cards. There were 22 of them,
of which 21 had numbers and represented vices and
virtues, forces of nature, etc., and one (le mat
or il matto), which had no number but the image
of the fool. That card was the precursor of the
joker. It was supposed to resemble the court jester
or fool and was drawn with odd simpering expressions
and curious postures in imitation of the typical
court's fool-a-well-established figure in those
days.
In the European courts of the Middle Ages, mentally
and physically deformed people, dwarfs, albinos,
and idiots were considered to be very amusing and
were dressed up in special outfits with bells and
funny hats and mismatched britches, etc. and given
great liberty to sass the king and pass wind at
will. Some perfectly sane and highly intelligent
men on occasion acted the fool so as to get into
that favored position and there practice their art
at satiric poetry and ribald plays free of any punishment
or disfavor. There was also for a long time a traditional
Middle Ages Feast of Fools, a raunchy celebration
something like the Saturnalia, held at the time
of the Feast of the Circumcision (not my idea of
a particularly enticing feast) and devoted more
and more to a travesty of the rituals of the Church.
The church at first (late 1300s) condoned cards
and favored those with religious themes printed
on their backs. Cardinal Mazarin taught young Louis
XIV his history, geography, and other courses with
cards having educational inscriptions on their backs.
They show up in the household accounts of Charles
VI of France in 1392.
The church took a dimmer view of the matter when
card gaming for money got more widespread, and by
the time of our Puritan Pilgrims, playing cards
were a definite no-no, "the devil's picture
book."
Gridwork designs on the backs of cards did not occur
until 1850, players having had suspicions about
possible card-marking made easier by the designs.
Double-headed cards with corner indices, originating
in France in the early 19th century, became standard
about 1870 in the U.S.
The appearances of the court cards have not changed
much since the reign of Henry VIII of England, but
are still shown with the royal court costume of
that time. The cap and bells of the usual joker
were modeled on the clothes of the guy who gallantly
amused Henry's wives prior to their beheadings.
A Mississippi riverboat gambler claimed to have
devised the joker in the mid-19th century to increase
the odds of getting good poker hands. But his claim
seems a trifle overstuffed, since the fool, the
court jester, or the joker has been a member in
good standing of the playing card community since
the Tarot cards of the 1300s.
The joker wielded its face in the U.S.A in the 1860s-its
name deriving from the Alsatian word "Juker"
(or more commonly euchre) meaning Jack-the whole
shebang coming ultimately from a game played in
Alsace (a European region that is sometimes part
of France, sometimes part of Germany) called "Bauer"
(German for farmer) in which two of the Jacks were
named "Rechts Bauer" and "Links Bauer"
(which words were corrupted into English as Right
Bower and Left Bower) and were accompanied by another
Jack called, in English, Best Bower.
I hope, George, you got a kick out of this show
of imaginative-if forgettable-historical virtuosity.
