9 ms·

World's Oldest joke traced back to 1900 BC (2008)

83 points by actually_a_dog 5y ago

ggm 5y ago
Petros/Petrus jokes in the bible?
User23 5y ago
Is it really fart or did they mean queef?
- CharlesW 5y ago
  Women fart. (Something I thought I'd never have to say.)
  - Igelau 5y ago
    I don't think GP was suggesting women don't fart. It's a relevant question.
  - Fern_Blossom 5y ago
    Pretty sure they are trying to finger out if there's a chance of mistranslation or an extra layer of pun to it.
    - readingnews 5y ago
      I am sure that "finger" is not a Freudian slip.
      - Fern_Blossom 5y ago
        Sadly, that joke will not last for 4,000 years :)
        User23 5y ago
        This literally made my wife laugh out loud.
  - canadianfella 5y ago
    You didn’t have to say it.
- teorema 5y ago
  Interestingly, I tried to track down something more scholarly because I think you're asking a fair question. I couldn't actually find anything. This was the closest I could find: https://janes.scholasticahq.com/article/2238.pdf https://janes.scholasticahq.com/article/2238.pdf It doesn't really answer your question although it does point to a genre of Sumerian humor involving sexual disgust. Some of the lines are vaguely similar to the one in the article.
- Igelau 5y ago
  That's a relevant question. "In her husband's lap" could be interpreted as girl-on-top, making pretty good odds for hilarious noises. I'd be interested to know how they did the translation.
donatj 5y ago
That's ajoke?
- Smaug123 5y ago
  Remember that jokes often struggle to survive translation from one modern language to another, let alone ancient Sumerian to modern English. There is, of course, an XKCD about the additional effect (https://xkcd.com/794/ https://xkcd.com/794/) when you're dealing with a completely different cultural background. It's even possible that joke technology has simply improved in the last couple of millennia; I can't remember where I read it, but I do remember reading a fairly compelling case that the art of fiction-writing has got noticeably better over the last 500 years or so.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Depends on the kind of joke. Stuff that's a reference to a pretty universal life experience tends to survive pretty well. Stuff based on double meanings or phonetics generally fares poorly.
  - Fern_Blossom 5y ago
    >I do remember reading a fairly compelling case that the art of fiction-writing has got noticeably better over the last 500 years or so. I've thought about this a bit since I've been trying to break into fiction writing. The thing I noticed, imagine how incredibly painful it was to edit your first draft back in the day. In comparison, these days we have month long contests (for fun) to write 50,000 word novels. Even though these are typically terrible, there are some that do get published and people enjoy. These stories are edited heavily. Not just grammar or spelling. Scenes are re-written. Added. Removed. Paragraphs moved. Erased. Added. Find/Replace to change a name. Etc. It's barely an inconvenience to do this on the computer. That's not easily the case with handwritten or typewritten pages. You end up re-typing it all out to see the next draft, just to notice how you need to butcher more of it and do it all over again. Page reformatting by itself is a God send. I think modern writers are able to revise their work more often and easily in far, far less time. Just one example, I type about 3-5 times faster than handwriting. That iteration process builds up more skill, thus, better writers. Old school writers, especially pre-typewriter, probably went, "First draft is the only draft" more often than we think (minus minor corrections of course). I think the typewriter allowed the feasibility of multiple drafts without losing your damn mind, but the word processor makes it almost normal practice for many pro-writers to have 10+ drafts. Some even do full rewrites for their second or even third draft NORMALLY. At that, the amount of professional stories someone would hear or read was minimal too. Most things were new to people even if you weren't original. These days, everyone has a huge backlog of stories they've read/heard over the years. Probably one year of someone's entertainment consumption was a lifetime over 100 years ago. I read somewhere that the average well-educated person (not scholar) in the 1700-1800s read in a month what average folks today (not even well educated) read/hear in about a day. Another example, if you want to make a comedy show, you have to see if Simpsons, Futurama, South Park or Family Guy already did the same gag because people will go, "You're unoriginal". Even South Park had an episode that Simpsons "already did it", and that was a decade ago. The bar is just super high now because of both storytelling skillsets and expectations from audiences. Just an observation from an idiot.
dhosek 5y ago
I’d never heard of Essex girl jokes before. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_girl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_girl
- anonymousiam 5y ago
  Same here. Apparently it's a UK thing. In Southern California it would be "Valley Girl" (as memorialized by Frank Zappa). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-LArv-sEQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-LArv-sEQU Also, it seems that some group successfully petitioned the Oxford University Press to remove "Essex Girl" from at least one of their dictionaries 'after a campaign group called the Essex Girls Liberation Front said using the expression was “very offensive”.' https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/05/essex-girl-removed-from-dictionary-following-campaign https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/05/essex-girl-r...
  - tucosan 5y ago
    When browsing Tik Tok, one gets the impression that not much has changed since Zappa released the song in ‘82.
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    It was removed from the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, but is still in the real deal, the Oxford English Dictionary.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    These things seem to wax and wane. When I was young, jokes about people from New Jersey or Poland were quite common but I haven't heard either in a long time. I'm sure this is quite regional but I'm in the same region as I was when I was a child so it's interesting to see how much those have faded.
    - fifticon 5y ago
      A long time ago I encountered a group of jokes based on a Poland stereotype (I haven't seen any in decades), where they would represent an 'unlucky' people. My favorite was: Q: "Who won the man-of-the-year award in Poland last year?" A: "No one" :-(
rland 5y ago
I believe that jokes/humor is way older than human language. Totally non-scientific, but my dog seems to be "happy" when something that she thinks is one way is actually the other. Like when I am totally silent, not looking at her, and then all of the sudden make a noise at her or look at her. She loves it. I think that's the essence of humor, it's when your brain experiences something it didn't expect in a low-stakes way.
- paleotrope 5y ago
  Subversion of expectations is the root of humor.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    And probably intelligence somehow. Overlapping substructures and recombinations.. also music.
    - tremon 5y ago
      I'd say that expectations require intelligence.
      - agumonkey 5y ago
        I'd argue that they only require memory
        10000truths 5y ago
        It requires both. You need memory in order to retain data, and you need intelligence to recognize patterns within that data and make inferences.
- bitwize 5y ago
  There's an evo-psy theory which says that humor originated in the relief we feel when something we perceive is threatening turns out not to be. The boggart turns into something innocuous, and we laugh at the thing that started to scare us but failed.
CharlesW 5y ago
The full list of 10: https://www.insider.com/historians-10-oldest-jokes-in-history-1900bc-2019-7#9-one-about-a-donkey-ancient-greece-300-400-ad-2 https://www.insider.com/historians-10-oldest-jokes-in-histor...
nr2x 5y ago
When my son started getting into fart jokes I told my wife he had a strictly classical approach to comedy and told her the oldest recorded joke was about farts.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
A joke as old as that really shows up the problems with time travel - "He was so set up that he concluded to make a speech —of course a humorous speech. I think I never heard so many old played-out jokes strung together in my life. He was worse than the minstrels, worse than the clown in the circus. It seemed peculiarly sad to sit here, thirteen hundred years before I was born, and listen again to poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years afterwards. It about convinced me that there isn’t any such thing as a new joke possible." Mark Twain - A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/174/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-court/3045/chapter-4-sir-dinadan-the-humorist/ https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/174/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-...
dvh 5y ago
Ugh, Ngh and Rgh walks into the cave...
MatthewWilkes 5y ago
A meta-joke for people not in the UK: the TV channel that commissioned this is famous for re-runs of older BBC comedy programmes.
prepend 5y ago
I’m sure the punchline to the actual oldest joke is “Hello Hungry, nice to meet you, my name is Dad.” It is likely something that took place in even the oldest family groups. And I expect it’s probably also used in the animal kingdom.
- enriquto 5y ago
  that this joke works seems to be a weird ambiguity of the English language. Do you know other languages where you can make this joke?
  - jjk166 5y ago
    It works in any language where names are a property of objects. There may be some languages where names and adjectives are always explicitly handled differently, but amongst the biggest language groups this does not appear to be the case.
    - enriquto 5y ago
      Maybe I didn't understand what joke are you referring to... is the punchline an answer to "I'm hungry"? If that is the case, there is no name here. In all non-english languages that I know, this sentence has not the same form as "I'm Hungry". For example in French it is "J'ai faim" (literally "I have hunger"), in spanish it can be "Tengo hambre" o "estoy hambriento"; if it was a name it would have different grammar: "Je suis Faim" or "Soy Hambriento". In most romance languages it will be similar. How is it in Russian, Arabic, Chinese?
      - jjk166 5y ago
        There's nothing specific about hunger, it's just a common example. It's just a response to I am [descriptive adjective] where the adjective is deliberately misinterpreted as a proper name. So it could be "Hi tired, I'm Dad" or "Hi bored, I'm Dad" etc.
geenew 5y ago
This seems related, it's from 1001 Nights, which is fairly old, and is the same type of joke as the one in the article: http://www.tomthumb.org/422/the-tale-of-abu-hasan-and-the-fart-1001-nights/ http://www.tomthumb.org/422/the-tale-of-abu-hasan-and-the-fa...

ggm 5y ago

Petros/Petrus jokes in the bible?

User23 5y ago

Is it really fart or did they mean queef?

CharlesW 5y ago
Women fart. (Something I thought I'd never have to say.)
- Igelau 5y ago
  I don't think GP was suggesting women don't fart. It's a relevant question.
- Fern_Blossom 5y ago
  Pretty sure they are trying to finger out if there's a chance of mistranslation or an extra layer of pun to it.
  - readingnews 5y ago
    I am sure that "finger" is not a Freudian slip.
    - Fern_Blossom 5y ago
      Sadly, that joke will not last for 4,000 years :)
      - User23 5y ago
        This literally made my wife laugh out loud.
- canadianfella 5y ago
  You didn’t have to say it.
teorema 5y ago
Interestingly, I tried to track down something more scholarly because I think you're asking a fair question. I couldn't actually find anything. This was the closest I could find: https://janes.scholasticahq.com/article/2238.pdf https://janes.scholasticahq.com/article/2238.pdf It doesn't really answer your question although it does point to a genre of Sumerian humor involving sexual disgust. Some of the lines are vaguely similar to the one in the article.
Igelau 5y ago
That's a relevant question. "In her husband's lap" could be interpreted as girl-on-top, making pretty good odds for hilarious noises. I'd be interested to know how they did the translation.

donatj 5y ago

That's ajoke?

Smaug123 5y ago
Remember that jokes often struggle to survive translation from one modern language to another, let alone ancient Sumerian to modern English. There is, of course, an XKCD about the additional effect (https://xkcd.com/794/ https://xkcd.com/794/) when you're dealing with a completely different cultural background. It's even possible that joke technology has simply improved in the last couple of millennia; I can't remember where I read it, but I do remember reading a fairly compelling case that the art of fiction-writing has got noticeably better over the last 500 years or so.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Depends on the kind of joke. Stuff that's a reference to a pretty universal life experience tends to survive pretty well. Stuff based on double meanings or phonetics generally fares poorly.
- Fern_Blossom 5y ago
  >I do remember reading a fairly compelling case that the art of fiction-writing has got noticeably better over the last 500 years or so. I've thought about this a bit since I've been trying to break into fiction writing. The thing I noticed, imagine how incredibly painful it was to edit your first draft back in the day. In comparison, these days we have month long contests (for fun) to write 50,000 word novels. Even though these are typically terrible, there are some that do get published and people enjoy. These stories are edited heavily. Not just grammar or spelling. Scenes are re-written. Added. Removed. Paragraphs moved. Erased. Added. Find/Replace to change a name. Etc. It's barely an inconvenience to do this on the computer. That's not easily the case with handwritten or typewritten pages. You end up re-typing it all out to see the next draft, just to notice how you need to butcher more of it and do it all over again. Page reformatting by itself is a God send. I think modern writers are able to revise their work more often and easily in far, far less time. Just one example, I type about 3-5 times faster than handwriting. That iteration process builds up more skill, thus, better writers. Old school writers, especially pre-typewriter, probably went, "First draft is the only draft" more often than we think (minus minor corrections of course). I think the typewriter allowed the feasibility of multiple drafts without losing your damn mind, but the word processor makes it almost normal practice for many pro-writers to have 10+ drafts. Some even do full rewrites for their second or even third draft NORMALLY. At that, the amount of professional stories someone would hear or read was minimal too. Most things were new to people even if you weren't original. These days, everyone has a huge backlog of stories they've read/heard over the years. Probably one year of someone's entertainment consumption was a lifetime over 100 years ago. I read somewhere that the average well-educated person (not scholar) in the 1700-1800s read in a month what average folks today (not even well educated) read/hear in about a day. Another example, if you want to make a comedy show, you have to see if Simpsons, Futurama, South Park or Family Guy already did the same gag because people will go, "You're unoriginal". Even South Park had an episode that Simpsons "already did it", and that was a decade ago. The bar is just super high now because of both storytelling skillsets and expectations from audiences. Just an observation from an idiot.

dhosek 5y ago

I’d never heard of Essex girl jokes before. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_girl https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_girl

anonymousiam 5y ago
Same here. Apparently it's a UK thing. In Southern California it would be "Valley Girl" (as memorialized by Frank Zappa). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-LArv-sEQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-LArv-sEQU Also, it seems that some group successfully petitioned the Oxford University Press to remove "Essex Girl" from at least one of their dictionaries 'after a campaign group called the Essex Girls Liberation Front said using the expression was “very offensive”.' https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/05/essex-girl-removed-from-dictionary-following-campaign https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/05/essex-girl-r...
- tucosan 5y ago
  When browsing Tik Tok, one gets the impression that not much has changed since Zappa released the song in ‘82.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  It was removed from the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, but is still in the real deal, the Oxford English Dictionary.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  These things seem to wax and wane. When I was young, jokes about people from New Jersey or Poland were quite common but I haven't heard either in a long time. I'm sure this is quite regional but I'm in the same region as I was when I was a child so it's interesting to see how much those have faded.
  - fifticon 5y ago
    A long time ago I encountered a group of jokes based on a Poland stereotype (I haven't seen any in decades), where they would represent an 'unlucky' people. My favorite was: Q: "Who won the man-of-the-year award in Poland last year?" A: "No one" :-(

rland 5y ago

I believe that jokes/humor is way older than human language. Totally non-scientific, but my dog seems to be "happy" when something that she thinks is one way is actually the other. Like when I am totally silent, not looking at her, and then all of the sudden make a noise at her or look at her. She loves it. I think that's the essence of humor, it's when your brain experiences something it didn't expect in a low-stakes way.

paleotrope 5y ago
Subversion of expectations is the root of humor.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  And probably intelligence somehow. Overlapping substructures and recombinations.. also music.
  - tremon 5y ago
    I'd say that expectations require intelligence.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      I'd argue that they only require memory
      - 10000truths 5y ago
        It requires both. You need memory in order to retain data, and you need intelligence to recognize patterns within that data and make inferences.
bitwize 5y ago
There's an evo-psy theory which says that humor originated in the relief we feel when something we perceive is threatening turns out not to be. The boggart turns into something innocuous, and we laugh at the thing that started to scare us but failed.

CharlesW 5y ago

The full list of 10: https://www.insider.com/historians-10-oldest-jokes-in-history-1900bc-2019-7#9-one-about-a-donkey-ancient-greece-300-400-ad-2 https://www.insider.com/historians-10-oldest-jokes-in-histor...

nr2x 5y ago

When my son started getting into fart jokes I told my wife he had a strictly classical approach to comedy and told her the oldest recorded joke was about farts.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

A joke as old as that really shows up the problems with time travel - "He was so set up that he concluded to make a speech —of course a humorous speech. I think I never heard so many old played-out jokes strung together in my life. He was worse than the minstrels, worse than the clown in the circus. It seemed peculiarly sad to sit here, thirteen hundred years before I was born, and listen again to poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years afterwards. It about convinced me that there isn’t any such thing as a new joke possible." Mark Twain - A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/174/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-court/3045/chapter-4-sir-dinadan-the-humorist/ https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/174/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-...

dvh 5y ago

Ugh, Ngh and Rgh walks into the cave...

MatthewWilkes 5y ago

A meta-joke for people not in the UK: the TV channel that commissioned this is famous for re-runs of older BBC comedy programmes.

prepend 5y ago

I’m sure the punchline to the actual oldest joke is “Hello Hungry, nice to meet you, my name is Dad.” It is likely something that took place in even the oldest family groups. And I expect it’s probably also used in the animal kingdom.

enriquto 5y ago
that this joke works seems to be a weird ambiguity of the English language. Do you know other languages where you can make this joke?
- jjk166 5y ago
  It works in any language where names are a property of objects. There may be some languages where names and adjectives are always explicitly handled differently, but amongst the biggest language groups this does not appear to be the case.
  - enriquto 5y ago
    Maybe I didn't understand what joke are you referring to... is the punchline an answer to "I'm hungry"? If that is the case, there is no name here. In all non-english languages that I know, this sentence has not the same form as "I'm Hungry". For example in French it is "J'ai faim" (literally "I have hunger"), in spanish it can be "Tengo hambre" o "estoy hambriento"; if it was a name it would have different grammar: "Je suis Faim" or "Soy Hambriento". In most romance languages it will be similar. How is it in Russian, Arabic, Chinese?
    - jjk166 5y ago
      There's nothing specific about hunger, it's just a common example. It's just a response to I am [descriptive adjective] where the adjective is deliberately misinterpreted as a proper name. So it could be "Hi tired, I'm Dad" or "Hi bored, I'm Dad" etc.

geenew 5y ago

This seems related, it's from 1001 Nights, which is fairly old, and is the same type of joke as the one in the article: http://www.tomthumb.org/422/the-tale-of-abu-hasan-and-the-fart-1001-nights/ http://www.tomthumb.org/422/the-tale-of-abu-hasan-and-the-fa...