Is there a source for the "Kleebob card game" gag George Burns used?

Many of the gags used in The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show had their roots in Vaudeville and were from their routines or even routines their friends did. In their very first episode on TV, The Kleebob Card Game, George tries to trick Gracie by frustrating her with a card game with strange rules, called Kleebob.:

A similar gag is used over 15 years later in the Star Trek episode A Piece of the Action for the game Fizzbin. It's quite possible the author of that episode got the idea from George Burns. But is there any evidence Burns got this idea for a gag elsewhere? Or is there any evidence he, or other performers, used it as a gag in Vaudeville?

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Best Answer

The gag was actually based on Sheepshead (aka Spitzer), a ridiculously complex card game, which in turn originated from the Bavarian "Schafkopf" card game. It's a "Trick Taking" card game, and the value of the cards in the trump suit in descending order are:

Q? 7? Q? Q? Q? J? J? J? J? A? 10? K? 9? 8?

This runs counter-intuitive to what you would normally think, which is A? would be the highest, and trumps would run A to 7 in descending order. The game is so complex that if you didn't fully understand the rules and scoring, you'd think it was invented on the spot.

The game was (is?) popular in heavily German-based areas such as Wisconsin, where it is apparently referred to as the unofficial state card game.

Burns and Gracie would have probably come across it in their travels, and created a variation for their skit. In the actual card game, a player can call "Sheepshead", "Bump", "Crack", "Recrack", "Castrate" or "Blitz", with points awarded for each call. This mirrors the "Dribble" and "Broadway" calls of Burns in the skit.