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MUNDANE MYSTERIES: Why Do Decks of Cards Have Jokers?
JOKERS WILD: The Reason Decks Of Cards Have Jokers
With all of us in lockdown during the pandemic, chances are you probably played a card game or two (hundred). So, be honest: have you ever played a card game where you actually used the joker cards? And I’m not talking about using them as stand-ins for missing cards. There just aren’t hardly any games that use joker cards. So why do decks have joker cards in them at all?
Jokers were originally added to card decks in the 1860s, well after card decks had become common. Jokers were added to capitalize on the popularity of “euchre”, a game derived from the Alsatian game “juckerspiel”. In its beginnings, the top trump cards in juckerspiel were the two one-eyed jacks, known as the “right bower” & the “left bower”. (FYI: while the direct translation of the German word “bauer” is farmer, bauer is actually the word they use for “jack”). But juckerspiel players eventually created a card that could trump even the high & mighty jacks. They called that card the “best bower,” which we now know as the joker.
Joker sounds pretty similar to “jucker” & “euchre”, so some folks think that that’s where the name of the card came from. But not everyone agrees with that assumption: Bicycle, the playing card company, says they’re certain that “it’s no more than a coincidence”. It’s could be that the jester/joker character was chosen merely because it worked well within the whole courtly medieval theme of kings & queens.
But why does every deck include two jokers, when euchre is only supposed to have one “best bower”? Well, no one’s really sure about that. The most likely reason is that playing card manufacturers just decided to keep with their traditional standard operating procedure of having an even number of cards per deck.
Euchre eventually fell by the wayside, as more Americans took up bridge as their card game of choice. But jokers eventually factored into a few other different games (poker, canasta, war, etc.) where they mostly serve as trump or wild cards (hence the phrase, “jokers wild”).
Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via social media (@AndyWebbRadioVoice), or shoot me an email at [email protected].
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Wake Up Crew Highlights: August 16, 2021
Wake Up Crew Highlights: August 16, 2021
House of the Week – 08/13/21
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MUNDANE MYSTERIES: What Is The Mandela Effect?
A lot of times, what you remember about your life is…well, it’s pretty inaccurate. Flat-out wrong, in a lot of cases. That’s because you’re suffering from “The Mandela Effect”. But what exactly is The Mandela Effect?
A blogger by the name of Fiona Broome actually coined the term back in 2009 when she attended a conference where she talked about the passing of South African president Nelson Mandela back in the 1980s. A lot of the folks she talked with also remembered Mandela dying in prison. Some even said they’d watched TV news coverage of it. The problem was…Mandela was very much still alive in 2009 (he didn’t pass until 2013, four years later).
The Mandela Effect, defined as a false memory shared by multiple people, seems like it should be a rare happenstance, but the phenomenon is actually pretty common. Do you remember the Berenstein Bears from when you were a kid? Or maybe “Shazam”, the movie about a genie played by Sinbad? Or what about the line from Star Wars, “Luke, I am your father”?
Yeah, about that…none of it actually happened. All of those are instances of The Mandela Effect: The Berenstein Bears were actually the Berenstain Bears; the genie movie was actually “Kazaam”, starring Shaquille O’Neal; and Darth Vader actually said “No, I am your father”. Yet, many will still swear by their false memories, even after they learn the real truth. So, what’s behind all this?
Psychologists say The Mandela Effect is a product of how our brains process info. Human memories aren’t perfect snapshots of what actually took place in real life. When we try to recall something, we’re only able to access part of the true story. So, to fill in the gaps, our brains pull different info from other memories.
So, try not to be shocked when I tell you that the Monopoly man never had a monocle, and that Tom Cruise doesn’t actually dance in his Ray-Bans & underwear in Risky Business. (He did dance in his underwear, just not in his shades.)
Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via social media (@AndyWebbRadioVoice), or shoot me an email at [email protected].
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