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Joke Time!

I like a joke as much as the next person but I have real difficulty telling them! Either I forget the punchline, miss a vital something, or…as my other half repeatedly says, I meander all over the place and end up telling a “mini-story” instead of a quick joke! But where do jokes come from? I thought I’d do some digging to see if I could find a plausible origin story. Turns out there isn’t one – what a surprise.

If you think about it though, jokes must have always been around in both a physical, slapstick, falling over AND in the verbal, play on words sense. I say this because I bet humans have always needed to laugh at each other – it seems to be a default, we laugh at ourselves, and we laugh at others, don’t we? When it comes to looking at recorded jokes, Wikipedia shares the following with us: The oldest identified joke is an ancient Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC containing toilet humour: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” Its records were dated to the Old Babylonian period, and the joke may go as far back as 2300 BC. The second oldest joke found on the Westcar Papyrus and believed to be about Sneferu was from Ancient Egypt circa 1600 BC: “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.” Isn’t it nice to know that toilet humour and sex were the subjects of “jokes” dating back thousands of years? Some things never change. My “research” then moved to look for the world’s funniest joke, and I discovered that good old Reader’s Digest has an article called… The 100 Funniest Jokes from the Last 100 Years. Here are a few I picked out.

Why don’t pirates take a shower before they walk the plank?

They just wash up on shore. Two Hollywood stars ran into each other at the door of their psychiatrist’s office.

“Hello, there,” said one. “Are you coming or going?”

“If I knew that,” said the other, “I wouldn’t be here.” “My son had to give up his career because of fallen arches.”

“He’s an athlete?”

“No—an architect.”

These give you an indication of the quality (or not) of the remaining 97 puns. Personally, I think the Ancient Egyptian one is funnier, but then again, I’m not a joke connoisseur! Perhaps Reader’s Digest should be advised to steer clear of the humour business. I’ll finish by asking you, the readers if you have a favourite joke? I’m not sure I do, and yet I came across this one whilst writing this article, and it did make me laugh… simplicity and a play on words. “ I went to the zoo the other day, there was only one dog in it, it was a shitzu.”

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