The jokers are two extra cards added to a deck of cards generally with pictures of court jesters. They are sometimes (although not often) used as wild cards in poker. Most card games remove the jokers from the deck before the action starts.
It has since been adopted into many other card games, where it often acts as a wild card, but may have other functions such as the top trump, a skip card (forcing another player to miss a turn), the lowest-ranking card, the highest-value card, or a card of a different value from the rest of the pack (see e.g. Zwicker ...