1900BC — The world’s oldest joke!
It was a ‘Flatulence’ joke, and of course, you would have cracked one yourself.
If you are wondering what flatulence joke in the title refers to, it is nothing but the fart joke (I have not come across the word flatulence before; it was always fart). Yes, you heard that right!
Farting is part of our body system as is eating and sleeping. Still, it has a taboo around it (and a humor club, of course) in most parts of the world unabatedly. Now that we have found records of fart jokes in Sumerian texts from a very distant period (read 1900 B.C), we can be sure that they have been around here for quite a while.
So, this was the oldest joke that we have found to date:
“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”
Did you find this joke funny? Well, I didn’t and I do not expect you to. We are not alone in not identifying this joke to be funny. Even Dr.Paul McDonald, who discovered this joke didn’t find it funny enough to crack a laugh and there is a reason behind it.
Let us consider a statistical joke as an example:
“Two random variables were talking in a bar. They thought they were being discrete but I heard their chatter continuously.”
Most of us might not get the above joke since you do not know the underlying statistical concepts (I get it as I am a Statistics student). In a similar way, we can consider different societies and social setup.
Every society has its approach to humor. This approach is imbibed in the cultural and traditional values of that society. Something that one group of people find funny might be offensive for people from some other part of the world and people with a different background.
The language also plays a crucial role. A joke, that is hilarious in its native language, may lose its cultural tang when translated.
The most important reason that it isn’t funny now is because, it is old! We are talking about a joke that is around 3920 years old (I used my calculator to calculate. Sometimes, I feel as dumb as Joey…) and even something as old as few months would lose its laughter value.
Taking a joke outside of its social setup and time will make no sense.
