The Club Calling the Spade Black

On a blackjack Website, I read a thread about a card counter doing a “great drunk act” (that’ll be another blog entry later). The post read:

The count goes up a bit, the drunk stops play with, “Can I change my bet?” The pit says sure. The drunk then takes the two greens he had bet and replaces them with two different greens from his stack. It totally cracked me up.

Then another card counter posted the reply: “Hilarious.”

Wow, really? I guess you had to be there. Aside from my strong aversion to the over-acting schtick of riffraff card counters, the “joke” just isn’t funny. It’s akin to the dealer asking, “You don’t want to double down on that blackjack?” Ha ha. That’s hilarious. What’s really sickening is that the table often laughs, and then laughs again when someone follows up with the classic, “Should I split my face cards?” Ha ha. I have a personal rule for such situations (provided there’s no heat risk): If any yahoo at the table jokes about splitting Tens, then I start splitting Tens at every opportunity without saying anything. There is a strong correlation between thinking the chitchat is funny and being superstitious about Ten-splitting. So the table often clears out. Who’s laughing now?

If you want to see how pathetic card counters are in their attempts at humor, read the blackjack Websites on April 1. Now, card counters do not have a monopoly on bad jokes; degenerates make jokes, too. A classic Asian “joke” is the past-posting joke: after a 30:1 baccarat hand is dealt, the player puts a tall stack of chips on the betting circle for the bonus sidebet. That’s hilarious, dude.

Having written all this, I now come to my point: dealers are the most unfunny people on the planet. However, while most aspiring comedians give up, dealers see every new table as a captive audience waiting for some free humor to relieve the tedium of losing money. You would think that with thousands of dealers with millennia of combined experience, the casino industry would have come up with more than six jokes by now, but such is not the case. There are six casino jokes:

1. If you try to color down a foreign chip at the table, sometimes the pit boss has to come over and look at the chip. If the chip is from any small casino, the boss will say, “They’re still open?” and then chuckle. Over a decade ago at the Westward Ho, the boss said this joke when I tried to color down a black chip from downtown. If he were making the joke with a touch of self-deprecating irony, I would have actually laughed with him, but instead we laughed at him, of course. I wonder where that boss is now …

2. Q: Why did Michael Jackson lose at blackjack? A: He didn’t hit on anything over 12.

3. Q: “What is the difference between someone praying in church and someone praying in a casino?” A punchline does not make this joke any funnier.

4. Q: “What is the difference between a blackjack player and a puppy dog?” This joke might be improved if we replace “blackjack player” with “dealer.”  Perhaps replace “puppy dog” with dealer, but then the punchline isn’t true.

5. When your hand needs one more Jack to improve into a monster hand, the dealer will say, “You’re one Jack off.” This joke can be turned into a fun social experiment. Next time you have a white male dealer, especially in Vegas, wait until you have a hand that needs another Jack. Then, say out loud, “Awww, I was one Jack short.” With probability 1, the dealer will seize the opportunity, beaming because your “Jack short” wording makes him think you’ve never heard the joke before, and you’ll think he’s hilarious for coming up with such clever improv.

6. When your hand consists of QQ, a white male Vegas dealer will say, “Siegfried and Roy.” This joke also can be turned into a game of cat-and-mouse. When the dealer says the “joke,” just ignore it as if you didn’t even hear that anything was said. I personally guarantee that he will repeat the joke as many times as is necessary for you to acknowledge the joke. After all, this is his showstopper! He’s been waiting all day for the perfect Iowa-tourist audience to be thrilled and amazed by his local comedic flair. I guarantee he will say it as if he invented it. He even hopes that you won’t get the joke at first, so that it’ll seem more clever when it dawns on you.

The phrase “dummy up and deal” isn’t taught these days in dealer school. Next time I hear any of these jokes, I just might say to the dealer, “Your choice—jokes or tokes?” Alternatively, I am willing to one-up the dealer with superior humor, if anyone will accept the challenge/invitation to email me Joke #7.