3 ms·

I think it's about the decoration, and I'm pretty sure the guy who painted himself in pitch did so in order to pretend he was wearing the leggings he couldn't f

• wahern 4y ago
  Presumably a stolen amphora would have been very fancy and possibly conspicuous, so more specifically the joke works like, a person bought a stolen Picasso to hang in his gallery, but crudely painted it over so he wouldn't get caught. I totally missed the pants/pitch joke, good catch. Reminds me of an episode of It's Always Sunny where Frank keeps flushing articles of clothing down the toilet and uses black paint to cover up, except it ends up being a pretext for a later, unrelated bit.
• joveian 4y ago
  I was wondering what other interpretation there could be. Still, while the translator chose a particularly dry way to put it I see that version as more likely. Putting on particularly tight clothing with any body hair at all tends to rip out hair, so I think the joke is about waxing rather than admitting the clothing is just too tight. You can imagine some pantomime after the joke. I've fairly sure I've seen at least one visual version of more or less this joke (in a cartoon). Personally, the idea that someone could invent a basic joke does not make sense to me. People can popularize specific jokes at a specific time but as I see it the jokes themselves are a physical part of the world there to be discovered and only specific detailed phrasing can really be created. Though I guess I would say the same about anything people are said to invent so maybe it is a matter of perspective. Still, I'd be surprised if a good portion of "modern humor" didn't predate homo sapiens as a species.