A history of… jokes

Were Abbott and Costello inspired by Homer?

I have always been intrigued by humour. My instincts tell me that the things that we find amusing are grounded in our personal experiences, and so people who are distant from us, temporally, culturally, or both, are unlikely to have laughed at the same things that amuse us. After all, I have been to see a fair few Shakespeare ‘comedies’ in my time, and the theatres were not exactly filled with gales of laughter (or at least not to the extent that I imagine they would have been in the 1600s). The research I have done for these pieces over the last year has, however, made me realise that the lives of people living thousands of miles and thousands of years from 21st-century Oxford have an incredible number of similarities with my own. So this week I’ll be researching the history of jokes. I wonder if you’ll find any ancient rib-ticklers actually funny?

What is generally considered to be the world’s oldest known joke is actually more like a humorous proverb – think of it as ‘observational comedy’. It is Sumerian, and it is at least 3,900 years old (though might be as much as 4,300):

Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap

I suspect that it may have worked better in the cultural context of time. The Sumerians are also the source, from two hundred years later, of a large collection of similarly amusing proverbs which were found on two clay tablets in Nippur at the end of the 19th century. It is important to note that at this point, 3,700 years ago, Sumerian had all but died as a spoken language and these tablets were almost certainly not written by a native speaker. They are notable in particular for the first known version of ‘The Bar Joke’.¹ here is the transcription from the cuneiform:

ur-gir₁₅-re ec₂-dam-ce₃ in-kur₉-ma
nij₂ na-me igi nu-mu-un-du₈
ne-en jal₂ taka₄-en-e-ce

(A dog entered a tavern and said: “I can’t see a thing. I’ll open this one!”)

There has been a fair amount of debate among Sumeriologists about what this means. As taverns were places where prostitution took place, there could be a double-entendre at play here. It could refer to the dog, expecting iniquity to be taking place and not finding it, opening a door. It could even mean that the dog had his eyes closed. The fact is that we will never know, but again it seems certain that the cultural context would make the interpretation more obvious. There is, however, another proverb from the same set that is much easier for us to relate to:

The dog understands “Take it!”, but it does not understand “Put it down!”

Moving forwards a century or so, to 1,600 BCE, we have the first recorded ancient Egyptian joke. Once again, I think that you probably had to have been there. It is on the Westcar Papyrus and is thought to have been about Sneferu, who was pharaoh a thousand years earlier, so this could actually be a 4,600-year-old joke!

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.

In Homer’s Odyssey, composed around 2,700 years ago, we get a lovely little bit of comedic word-play. Odysseus and his men have been captured by the cyclops Polyphemus who asks our hero his name, to which Odysseus replies “Οὖτις”, which means ‘nobody’.

“Cyclops,” I said, “you ask me my name. I’ll tell it to you; and in return give me the gift you promised me. My name is Nobody. That is what I am called by my mother and father and by all my friends.”

He then proceeds to get Polyphemus drunk, and as the giant lies in a stupor, drives a stake into his eye, thus blinding him. Waking, wracked in pain, Polyphemus cries out to his fellow cyclopses to ask for help, but when asked who has attacked him, he has to reply “Nobody”:

 “What on earth is wrong with you, Polyphemus? Why must you disturb the peaceful night and spoil our sleep with all this shouting? Is a robber driving off your sheep, or is somebody trying by treachery or violence to kill you?”

Out of the cave came mighty Polyphemus’ voice in reply: “O my friends, it’s Nobody’s treachery, not violence, that is doing me to death.”

“Well then,” came the immediate reply, “if you are alone and nobody is assaulting you, you must be sick and sickness comes from almighty Zeus and cannot be helped. All you can do is to pray to your father, the Lord Poseidon.”

What I love about this is that it is the same comedic concept as the one used in Abbott and Costello’s famous ‘Who’s on first?’ routine.

In the Book of Exodus, written around 2,500 years ago, we have something which, if not a joke, is certainly a snark:

And they said unto Moses, Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? 

Humour was an important part of the lives of the ancient Romans. The remains of Pompeii, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79, have numerous (generally scatological and/or sexual) gags graffitied on their walls. One longer-form joke was recorded by Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius in his book Saturnalia and was written around the year 400, though the joke itself is thought to be a couple of hundred years older (with this, and the Greek jokes later on, I have done a little rewriting to give it a more modern cadence and style, but the comedic principle remains unchanged):

A man from the provinces visited Rome for the first time and everyone he met commented on his incredible resemblance to the emperor Augustus. Augustus, hearing about the man, had him brought to his palace.

“It’s uncanny, we look so alike we could almost be brothers!” remarked the emperor. “Say, did your mother ever come to Rome when she was younger?”

“No,” replied the man “but my father frequently did.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) is remembered as one of the greatest Roman orators, lawyers and statesmen. He was also, it seems, one of its greatest comics, as in the same book Macrobius goes on to tell us that:

The two most eloquent men that antiquity produced—the comedian Plautus and the orator Cicero—were also its two best at telling jokes. … Who doesn’t know that Cicero’s enemies routinely used to call him ‘the consular clown’?

You may find online that description of Cicero, consularis scurra, translated as ‘the stand-up Consul’. This is, I fear, a somewhat creative translation. To digress briefly, the first reported use in English of the term ‘stand-up’ in relation to a comedic performance dates from the The Stage in April 1911, relating to Miss Nellie Perrier: 

Not only did she render “stand up” comic ditties in a chic and charming manner, but she also proved herself to be a capable pianist whilst singing several songs to her own accompaniment.

Interestingly however, the common usage of stand-up probably has nothing to do with Miss Perrier, nor the fact that the comedians performed standing up. Rather it derives from the the fact that in the first half of the 20th century the vast majority of the comedy clubs in America were owned and run by the Mob. Comedians who wanted to perform there had to be reliable and not cause trouble – they had to be ‘stand-up guys’.

Back to Cicero: Plutarch writes that he was not a naturally gifted speaker, and used humour as a tool to compensate, but sometimes went too far:

Cicero was often carried away by his love of jesting into scurrility, and when, to gain his ends in his cases, he treated matters worthy of serious attention with ironical mirth and pleasantry, he was careless of propriety.

To be fair, this was a failing that Cicero acknowledged in himself:

The hardest thing for quick-witted people to do: to take stock of the people, the circumstances, and to hold back the quips that come to mind even when it would be totally hilarious to say them.

When he didn’t hold back, he could be pretty funny, as Plutarch recounts:

Upon Caesar’s bringing forward a law for the division of the lands in Campania amongst the soldiers, many in the senate opposed it; amongst them, Lucius Gellius, one of the oldest men in the house, said it should never pass whilst he lived. “Let us postpone it,” said Cicero. “Gellius does not ask us to wait long.”

Sadly for Cicero, making fun of people, then as now, was a good way of making enemies. After he was put to death on the orders of Mark Anthony, his severed head was reportedly taken by Anthony’s wife, Fulvia, who pulled out his tongue and stabbed it repeatedly with her hairpin, so as to punish the organ that had vexed her so much!

We know that the ancient Greeks liked a laugh from tantalising references to two lost books. In the first volume of Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 335 BCE) he writes that in the second volume he will explore comedy and focus upon what makes things funny, but sadly this volume no longer exists.² Around the same time Philip II of Macedon (father of Alexander the Great) paid for someone to write down all of the jokes cracked in a social club in Athens so that he would have a handy book of quips, but again no trace of this remains.

The Greeks did, however, produce the oldest joke book still in existence. Φιλόγελως (Philogelos or ‘Love of Laughter’, sometimes called The Jests of Hierocles and Philagrius) was seemingly written by two men, Hierocles and Philagrius, about whom nothing is known and is probably around 1,700 years old. It contains 265 jokes (although some are more or less identical) many of which work for a modern audience. For example, we have the first known ‘Doctor, doctor’ joke:

A man visited his doctor and said “Doctor, please can you help me? Every morning I feel dizzy for half an hour after waking up!” “Well,” said the doctor, “have you tried waking up half an hour later?”

We have a forerunner of Monty Python’s ‘Dead Parrot Sketch’ though, err, it involves a dead slave:

A man furiously reproached a slave dealer, saying “Hey, that slave you sold me yesterday has died!” “That’s strange,” replied the slave dealer, “he never did that when I owned him.”

And we have absurdist humour:

A merchant was about to set sail on treacherous seas and his slaves were terrified by the risk. To placate them he called for his will, and rewrote it. “There now, you have nothing to worry about; if we die my will ensures that you will be granted your freedom!”

There once was a man who asked everyone he met how much their clothes cost. When his father heard, he was furious and reprimanded his child. The son said, “This is nonsense; who told you I was doing that?” “Bill told me!” said his father. “Bill, ha! How can you believe the word of a man who never spent more than 50 drachmas on a cloak?” his son replied.

Finally let’s jump forwards almost a thousand years to hear the oldest-known joke (really a comedic riddle) in English. It comes from a 10th-century book of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and is a bit on the saucy side:

What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before?

A key.

Having spent arguably far too long delving into the history of jokes, and reading hundreds of them that are millennia old, my main conclusion is that, broadly speaking, ancient peoples had pretty similar senses of humour to our own. This shouldn’t really be a surprise, but I find it comforting to know that if I had been hanging out in an ancient Greek tavern (and been able to speak the language) I could have had a laugh with the regulars. If you are in the mood to read more humour-related content, why not read about the author of a 17th-century joke book?

1. For example: A horse walks into a bar and orders a pint of beer. “Coming right up!” says the barman. “But why the long face?”

2. This lost volume is central to the plot of Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose.