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. :(

[arib.livejournal.com]

"Why did the chicken cross the Nile?"

[ilthit.livejournal.com]

Sumerians, you suck at jokes. :D

[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?"...