According to the Brits, the “world’s oldest joke” has been traced back to 1900 BC.
You can thank the 19th Century BC for bringing us other such whacky hilarity as the rise and fall of several unpronounceable Pharaohs (where by unpronounceable I mean they all had the same name and I can’t pronounce it); the birth of Abraham, founding father of the Israelites (and that really annoying song about his many sons we used to have to sing in choir as a warm-up); a war or two, and an invasion of Greece by some other Greeks, presumably because they were attention whores and wanted an awesome blockbuster action movie to be made about them 40-odd centuries later.
Thanks to the research of the esteemed University of Wolverhampton, we can now add the birth of toilet humour to that list.
I’m not even kidding, it was a smut joke. Check this out for cutting edge Sumerian wit: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”
Oho! Zing! Yeah, you uh… you tell ‘em. Did I mention the 19th Century BC also played host to the fall of the last Sumerian dynasty? Yeah. I think I can see where the downward spiral kicked in. It could possibly have had something to do with their civilisation being run by potty-training toddlers and giggling pre-teens.
But hey, who am I to judge? Us 21st Century-goers are the ones funding actual university programmes for intensive research into dirty jokes. Their final publication on the study was actually the “world’s oldest top 10 joke list”, which sounds like a Cracked article waiting to happen.
Landing a close second place a few centuries later was a gag about another unpronounceable pharaoh quoted as “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.” Talk about eccentric. Apparently hiring a stripper was too easy for this guy.
Coming from the Brits in the 10th Century we have “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before? A key!” Gosh! And here I was thinking it was going to be your penis! Oh those crazy Anglo-Saxons, they sure fooled me with their provocative irony and rebellion against taboo.
I guess what’s really more comical than the jokes themselves is that nothing has really changed in the last four millennia. But can we learn from our mistakes, people? You know as well as I do it was only a matter of time before the Ancient Egyptians started gluing captions to their cats, plus those Sumerians were probably right into the 2 Girls 1 Cup action, and look what happened to them.
Let us break the cycle, once and for all.
