Oldest Recorded Joke

[browngirl]

From ceo: 'World's oldest joke traced back to 1900 BC', with some other ancient jokes included.

Comments

I wish to the Great Above I owned this book

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

25-odd years ago, the only way I could learn anything about Sumerian literature was to immerse myself in the basement stacks of the library at Washington University in St. Louis. There weren't a lot of English translations available at the time, and that area of research wasn't Teh Shiny for people, so it was mostly ignored. I used to sit there after work and read and read and read. I found a book of Sumerian and Babylonian proverbs and wisdom literature, and read it for hours on end. I remember a whole lot of funny stuff in there. I remember something in it like "You think that I am jolly because I wear the clothes of a fat woman and I laugh a lot. Think again!" That was embedded among the jokes. I've never forgotten it. I wonder if that book's still there or whether it got purged as obsolete. :(

Re: I wish to the Great Above I owned this book

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean! My area of special obsession is a little easier, but I've spent hours and hours in the back of libraries, too, reading about and sometimes the very words of people dead four thousand years. It just prickles the hair on the back of my neck when I feel that connection.

[arib.livejournal.com]

"Why did the chicken cross the Nile?"

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

To avoid the crocodiles!

[ilthit.livejournal.com]

Sumerians, you suck at jokes. :D

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

*laugh* I wonder if 'sitting in her husband's lap' is euphemistic...

[ilthit.livejournal.com]

Probably!

[rickvs.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to refine in my head a mashup of the world's funniest with the world's oldest joke. It seems mandatory that it contain the words, "I hit my friend with a spear while we were hunting, and I think he's dead. What do I do?"...

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

*laugh* It sounds like quite the tale.