Are there jokes so ancient they were carved on stone tablets?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe. The fourth century Greek Philogelos (a laugh addict) with 265 jokes was written on a scroll. The stone tablet with a Young Wife’s Biscuit Joke shown above was made up for a February 7, 1906 cartoon in the weekly American humor magazine Puck.

 

There is an article by Erik Van Rheenen in Mental Floss on August 3, 2019 titled 15 Jokes from the world’s oldest joke book, and another by Bill Bostock at Insider on August 17, 2019 titled These are the 10 oldest jokes in human history – and they prove that people have been laughing about their animals and sex lives for 4,000 years.

 

I looked up the William Berg translation of Philogelos and found there were jokes specifically on residents of three places: 29 about Kymeans, 18 about Abderites, and 12 about Sidonians.

 

Joke #173 says:

 

“A guy from Kyme is selling honey. Someone comes along, gives it a taste, and exclaims, ‘Hey, that’s good honey.’ ‘Yeah,’ says the Kymean, ‘and if that mouse hadn’t fallen into it, I wouldn’t be selling it now.’ “

 

There are three jokes about lamps, but not one about how many men it takes to refill one (the ancestor for how many it takes to screw in a light bulb).