Have you ever wondered where the joker in a pack of cards comes from? Also, is there a different between a jester, a clown, and a joker? Why not call it the clown or the jester?
In my book, Between Roses (buy here!), there is a character called, The Joker. It’s inspired by the idea of a pack of cards having a joker card. In a game of cards, usually you don’t want the joker card. It’s often the alienated one. Some games tell you to remove the joker card. With this in mind, I created The Joker to be a character that exists outside. Outside…where? You could say The Joker exists outside reality a little bit.
Who or what it really is, whether or not it’s the same as the Snarkersnatch, or even if it’s a being or creature, is unclear even in the story which is no spoiler.
But here, I want to get into reality because I became curious about the origin of the real joker card in a pack of playing cards. What’s the origin of this card and why call it a joker card and why is there a jester on it? Who started it? How far back does the history go?
Jucker: Where “joker” got it’s name
The joker is either that card you don’t want, or in some cases, it’s a wild card. You can name it whatever you want it to be. It’s a good guy and a bad guy. Kind of like a grey character, I suppose.
The “joker” name comes from a card game in Germany. The game was called “Jucker” or Juckerspiel which means “game of Jucker” (I’m guessing “spiel” means “game of”). They also said Juckern which means “playing Jucker”. It’s said to be the game that would later name that specific wild card as “joker”.
Very confusing. A game with the name named the card for the other game.
Juckern‘s first appearance is actually in a 1792 German dictionary described as “a game with cards” in the Palatinate region. What is the Palatinate region? It’s a historical region of Germany. The link will take you to the Wiki article if you’d like a further dive down the rabbit hole, but here, I’m going to move on.
In the 1830s to 1870s, Jucker was referenced in literature (once in French as youker), but no complete set of rules was ever described. But we do know it’s a trick-taking game where you take five tricks. What is a trick-taking game?
I’ll get to that in a moment.
Euchre: First American Card Game with Joker Card
Euchre is considered to be to the first instance of a game having a joker card, and it’s said, as you can probably guess from the name, that “Jucker” is the origin of the game “Euchre”. It’s said, so that means we don’t know for sure, but I feel like it’s incredibly possible given that there was eucre and uker going around in the 1800s in America.
At some point, German immigrants possibly perhaps introduced the game of Jucker, and at some point, someone got the grand idea to start mixing the games. I mean, why wouldn’t you? That sounds like a lot of fun.
Anyway, what is Euchre?
Euchre is a card game from the 1860s. Maybe some people wanted to get away from the often harsh reality and have a little fun? But the card known today as “the joker card” was known as the “trump card” back then.
Trump Card: It’s a card that has the authority to trick people. It comes from the Latin word “triumphus” meaning “triumph” or “victory”.
In Euchre, a suit is chosen as a “trump suit” and gets a higher rank than all the other suits and prevents other players from playing that suit in the game. If you have the trump card (like the one depicted on the left) in your possession, you can then name a suit as a trump suit which gives you control over other people’s cards. The trump card didn’t get wild card status until later (1875-ish).
I tried my best to paraphrase but here’s the source of the info for your perusal. Euchre, like it’s supposed ancestor Jucker, is also a trick-taking game. I wish I could tell you exactly what a trick-taking game is, but you’re on your own. You can find more about it here. I’m not tricky enough to understand it.
And so, we have Euchre now signaling out this trump card which has a lot of power in the game as it can give leverage to whatever suit you want. You can control the game in your favor with this card.
“Trump” to “Joker”: a Theory on the Name
Based on the above, I have a theory about why the card went from being called “trump card” to “joker”.
Perhaps the trump card, the card that “tricks” the game to move in the player’s favor, came to be known as the “joker” because what is a joker if not someone who plays tricks on other people? It’s very possible, I think, that the person with the trump card was called a “joker”, and at some point, the card came to be known as “the joker’s card” and then hence, “the joker card” and, finally, “the joker”. What do you think?
Tangent: What’s the difference between joker, jester, and clown?
Let me take you on a slight tangent before we get into how this trump card went from looking like the card above, to having a jester on it.
I want to know if there’s a difference between joker, jester, and clown in terms of definition. According to Oxford Dictionaries,
Joker: “A person who is fond of joking.” OR “A playing card, typically bearing the figure of a jester, used in some games as a wild card” (OD: joker).
Jester: “A professional joker or ‘fool’ at a medieval court, typically wearing a cap with bells on it and carrying a mock sceptre” (OD: jester).
Clown: “A comic entertainer, especially one in a circus, wearing a traditional costume and exaggerated make-up” (OD: clown).
So…a joker is just us silly human beans, a jester is medieval cliché, and a clown is modern but stuck in tradition. Got it.
Who Put a Jester on the Joker Card?
When you look at the old one above from 1863, you can see that there’s no jester on the trump card, so who put a jester on it later on? What I ended up finding was a rabbit hole deeper than I had imagined, so let’s take a peek into it.
First, we need to figure out who was widely printing the playing cards in the 1860s, and for that we need to go back in time a little bit. That was Charles Goodall & Sons, a British playing card maker. After a fire in 1845, the company lost a lot of stock for printing cards, and then began to massively print their recently created modernized court cards with the double face (typically, King, Queen, and Jack, not including Joker). By 1850, the company was one of the most massive playing card makers.
Here in “Face cards wiki“, it’s claimed that until the 1860s, the Joker didn’t have a face on it. So, maybe, because Charles Goodall & Sons’ court cards didn’t include the Joker, it can be inferred that perhaps adding a jester after the 1860s was just part of elevating design and competing with their competitor De La Rue. They did a lot of that if you give a swift read through of the Wiki.
So, we still don’t have the answer as to why it’s a joker, but I think my theory from earlier leads to the answer. It’s a trickster card, so who in the court would be the trickster? Of course, the fool, the jester. And so, there’s a jester on the Joker.
I was very brief explaining the situation with Charles Goodall & Sons, but I think it would be fun to look into the history of playing cards as a whole, because even from the Wiki, it sounded like a wild story. Imagine what could be discovered with a little more thorough digging.
Tangent: In Japan, By the Way
By the way, a collection of playing cards is called “torumpu” in Japanese, but these days (2025) I see it being called “pureingu ka-do” much more which literally is “playing card”, so, obviously, I’m not the only one having some reaction toward “trump”. And the joker card is called “jo-ka” which is literally just “joker”.
Summary
What do we know about the origin of the joker card?
The role of the joker card likely originated in Germany through a game called Jucker, which later, supposedly, appeared in America through German immigrants. They called the game Eucher. Both are trick-taking games. I theorized that the “trump card” became “the joker” based on the fact that the card is a “trickster’s card” hence, a “joker’s card”.
Perhaps it can be said that Charles Goodall & Sons, a massive contributor to the playing card market, printed the Joker with a person on it to elevate the designs of the cards after the 1860s. However, the idea of a jester for the design may have come from the fact that the joker in a court would be a jester. So, among the court cards King, Queen, and Jack, there is the Joker depicted as a jester.
And that is the origin of the Joker Card.
Of course, there’s probably more to this story than meets the eye, as is the case with many origin stories in the world.
FOXWOOD FOREST 