Why do they include jokers in a deck of playing cards?

The joker is an obscure and (according to some) useless addition to a deck of modern playing cards -- but it was originally a powerful card. Discover the history of the joker card and the modern card deck in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Brainstuff from Hosts dot com where smart Happens.
Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, why do they
include jokers and a deck of playing cards? Jokers are
one of those funny things. Many decks don't have jokers

(00:23):
and in most cases you can lose the jokers and
it doesn't matter. So why include them? And while we're
on the topic, where did any of the cards in
the deck come from? Why are there fifty two cards
with four suits and thirteen cards to a suit? According
to Britannica dot com, the fifty two card deck that
we used today is a modification of part of the

(00:44):
standard to row deck, made up of the major arcana
and the minor arcana minus the night cards. Probably around
the fifteenth century, the deck started settling into the modern
form that we know today. The joker, however, did not
here until sometime around the eighteen sixties. At that time,
the game of Yuker was extremely popular. It was later

(01:08):
unseated by bridge. In Yuker. Under the British rules, there
is a card known as the Imperial Bower or best Bower,
that trumps all the other cards. Decks of cards began
to include a special Imperial Bower card, and it later
morphed into the Joker card that we know today. Be

(01:28):
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