World's Oldest joke traced back to 1900 BC (2008) | Hacker News Reader

World's Oldest joke traced back to 1900 BC (2008)

reuters.com

I believe that jokes/humor is way older than human language.

Totally non-scientific, but my dog seems to be "happy" when something that she thinks is one way is actually the other. Like when I am totally silent, not looking at her, and then all of the sudden make a noise at her or look at her. She loves it.

I think that's the essence of humor, it's when your brain experiences something it didn't expect in a low-stakes way.

Subversion of expectations is the root of humor.

And probably intelligence somehow. Overlapping substructures and recombinations.. also music.

I'd say that expectations require intelligence.

I'd argue that they only require memory

It requires both. You need memory in order to retain data, and you need intelligence to recognize patterns within that data and make inferences.

There's an evo-psy theory which says that humor originated in the relief we feel when something we perceive is threatening turns out not to be. The boggart turns into something innocuous, and we laugh at the thing that started to scare us but failed.

Which makes an awful lot of sense! Its a pretty effective way of 'infecting' others with the knowledge that the situation is not dangerous without the burden of having to develop a language.

That's an interesting theory. A related-sounding interesting one I heard (in Marvin Minsky's class, as part of a larger model of the human mind) is that the humor response might have evolved to encourage the brain to identify nonsense, and to inhibit learning of nonsense.

I guess that that the learning aspect could fit even better with primitive threat identification than with general learning? (What inputs initially seemed like a threat, turned out not to be, so don't over-learn from initial mistaken emotional reaction to that incident that "inputs => threat"? Or have the enjoyable "good" of the eventual reaction counteract the initial "bad" reaction in primitive learning?)

(I'm not representing the theory well, and I know very little of whatever applicable psych/cogsci research.)

Off-topic, but I want to ask because you seem like someone who might have heard a theory:

Why do we appreciate beauty? As in natural beauty. A sunset, a rolling field, the stars, a colorful flower, etc.

I'm sorry I don't recall at the moment (4am break from work :) what Minsky said about that.

His last book was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emotion_Machine

(Incidentally, it's a huge loss that Minsky is no longer with us, but I'm glad I got a chance to at least take his class before he passed. Each session, he'd just talk about what he had been working on earlier that day, for The Emotion Machine. One of his PhD students, Push Singh (a great person, who tragically passed way too soon, after an injury), once told me a significant part of his studies was simply talking with Minsky, and Push thought that was pretty great. He also once mentioned that Minsky wanted 10-year grad students, when the norm in the lab was maybe 4-5. I suppose we can still be inspired by some of Minsky's scholarly practices and endless curiosity, as we can find and make the time.)

Also, I'm sure others on HN know much more of the science and philosophy of natural beauty than the tidbits I do, and this seems like it could be a good "Ask HN".

Maybe not just look at natural beauty, but also human beauty, and music? (An evolutionary basis for a sense of beauty of the human face and form seems too obvious. But maybe there are related simple evolutionary explanations for some of natural beauty, like attraction to advantageous settings and resources? Or maybe it's less obvious, like music?)

An unsentimental and slightly creepy theory if you like that kind of thing is that both humor and aesthetic sensibilities evolved as a group defense against psychopathy. Some species including ours gain an advantage among competing species through co-operation among themselves. A species using this strategy is vulnerable to freeloaders within its ranks who optimize their own survival at the expense of the group. The theory goes that an empathy deficit in individuals correlates with other deficits (e.g., in a sense of humor) that might be harder for the individual to hide and therefore easier for the group to detect. By ostracizing the psychopath on that basis, the group increases its overall fitness.

Thanks, I had that humor idea rolling around in my mind since the early 90's strong AI era but had forgotten where I read it. Minsky sounds about right. Humor is a forced reset of a failed prediction model, reality does not conform to prediction, shake up that snowglobe of a mind and let reality rewrite prediction. Strengthening bad predictions isn't a good idea for survival.

I feel threatened => I immediately (without any analyzis) "threaten back" by showing my teeth (beware, I will bite you!). Then I understand there is no threat, and I disguise this first (inadequate) instinctive reaction by transmuting it into something which progressively became recognized as a smile/laugh.

There is another similar theory about a dog barking and running at his master because he didn't reckon him as such (many dogs are short sighted), then understanding his mistake and also transmuting this aggressive instinctive response into a "dance" (barking at and standing up towards his master).

"We do not joke," said Nessus. "My species has no sense of humor." "Strange. I would have thought that humor was an aspect of intelligence." "No. Humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism." "All the same--" "Speaker, no sapient being ever interrupts a defense mechanism."

-- Ringworld

Considering there are many things we find humorous but never find threatening and many cases where we are relieved but don't find anything humorous, that theory seems dubious.

A better explanation would be that we laugh at contradictions so as to signal to others that we recognize the contradictions. This both serves to demonstrate our intelligence and social skills (someone who gets jokes quickly comes off as smart and gregarious, the person who doesn't laugh seems either slow or weird), as well as to communicate information (if you laugh at someone who breaks a social rule, they very quickly learn the rule. You laugh at children doing dumb stuff, as well as friends and family, but random adults doing the same thing just appear sad). Especially in a pre-linguistic society, this ability to convey information is extremely important, and analogues can be seen in many species.

I don't think that is the same response - I think your dog is getting excited because you're signaling you want to play. If you pretend to put a treat under a cup and lift the cup to show no treat is present the dog won't be amused, they will be annoyed. I'm not sure dogs have a sense of humor in the same way primates do.

I don't think that would be humorous to a human, either.

Intriguing perhaps, but then I expect most dogs would be intrigued as well.

But if you have two dogs, and one dog is contentedly chewing on a bone, and then you trick the other one - will the contented dog be amused?

that’s not really low stakes for a dog, or anyone hungry for that matter.

I obviously don't know your relationship with dogs, but my initial reaction was that anybody who knows them well would disagree; not only do they have a sense of humour but they will also grin to show it.

Admittedly, this is can be somewhat off-putting because the smile doesn't reach their eyes, so perhaps they are just mimicking us, but whatever it is they are indicating an understanding that a joke is intended, beyond normal happiness and play.

On the one hand, we cannot assume that animal expressions have any relation to similar expressions in humans. See for example how the misunderstanding of facial expressions between great apes and humans (in both directions) has often lead to violence, and they're our closest relatives.

However, I have a pet* theory that the long evolutionary history of dogs with humans has little by little made their facial expressions converge towards reasonable approximations of human expressions. Which of the ancestors of modern dogs were more likely to survive in the company of humans: those whose expression looked human-happy when the dog was feeling a positive canine emotion? Or those whose expression looked human-happy when they were feeling aggressive, fearful, disappointed, etc?

* No pun intended

I'm always curious with just how much my husky uses her paw to "activate" things. We definitely reinforce the notion by helping her out with whatever she paws, but it does seem like a cultural thing she's learned rather than the more dextrous bite they have.

In this case it's pretty mundane probably, she's using something more expressive to humans and it's happened to work well, but it still imparts on me that a dog living among humans picks up some pretty different signalling

My current dog is awesome but he does not have a sense of humor. Whenever I play jokes on him, he just gets concerned.

Yep. There are plenty of videos of non-human primates appearing to be amused by a trick or even the error of another. It's nice to see humor that can cross the boundaries of species.

You describe (what might be) a perception of humor.

But that’s not the same as a joke, which even defined broadly enough not to require language, is an deliberate act chosen to appeal to such a perception.

Blowing raspberries on a baby is essentially a fart joke that they understand.

That's a bit of a leap. They might enjoy the sensation, or the human contact, or the noise. Is there any reason to think they're making a cognitive connection between that and farting?

I, too, am sceptical of the raspberry-fart connection. However, both of my children would fart and then laugh when they were tiny infants, so I definitely believe that there is a near instinctual fart humour.

I've seen non speaking babies giggle and smile hearing a fart. I suspect fart jokes go back much farther than that. However, this article is about the oldest recorded joke.

I just took a 300 level course on the psychology of humor that hit on a few theories of humor. What you describe with your doggo would fit mostly within the "incongruity theory," if you're interested in looking it up. Pretty fascinating stuff!

where did you take the course?

Park University, a small private uni in Parkville, Missouri.

A joke as old as that really shows up the problems with time travel -

"He was so set up that he concluded to make a speech —of course a humorous speech. I think I never heard so many old played-out jokes strung together in my life. He was worse than the minstrels, worse than the clown in the circus. It seemed peculiarly sad to sit here, thirteen hundred years before I was born, and listen again to poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years afterwards. It about convinced me that there isn’t any such thing as a new joke possible."

Mark Twain - A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court

https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/174/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-...

The full list of 10: https://www.insider.com/historians-10-oldest-jokes-in-histor...

When my son started getting into fart jokes I told my wife he had a strictly classical approach to comedy and told her the oldest recorded joke was about farts.

I’d never heard of Essex girl jokes before. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_girl

Same here. Apparently it's a UK thing. In Southern California it would be "Valley Girl" (as memorialized by Frank Zappa). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-LArv-sEQU

Also, it seems that some group successfully petitioned the Oxford University Press to remove "Essex Girl" from at least one of their dictionaries 'after a campaign group called the Essex Girls Liberation Front said using the expression was “very offensive”.' https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/05/essex-girl-r...

When browsing Tik Tok, one gets the impression that not much has changed since Zappa released the song in ‘82.

It was removed from the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, but is still in the real deal, the Oxford English Dictionary.

These things seem to wax and wane. When I was young, jokes about people from New Jersey or Poland were quite common but I haven't heard either in a long time. I'm sure this is quite regional but I'm in the same region as I was when I was a child so it's interesting to see how much those have faded.

A long time ago I encountered a group of jokes based on a Poland stereotype (I haven't seen any in decades), where they would represent an 'unlucky' people. My favorite was: Q: "Who won the man-of-the-year award in Poland last year?" A: "No one" :-(

Lots of joke types have national variations.

For instance the butt of the "stupid nationality" jokes will vary by country but otherwise be the exact same joke.

I (having grown up in Essex, and moved to California) describe my home area as "The Jersey Shore of England". There's precedent in that one of the closest equivalent TV programs is named "The Only Way Is Essex".

That was a rubbish aside note. Without it the article is quite decent.

They were a thing a few decades ago not really now. I mostly associate them with the 80s

A meta-joke for people not in the UK: the TV channel that commissioned this is famous for re-runs of older BBC comedy programmes.

This seems related, it's from 1001 Nights, which is fairly old, and is the same type of joke as the one in the article:

http://www.tomthumb.org/422/the-tale-of-abu-hasan-and-the-fa...

That's ajoke?

Remember that jokes often struggle to survive translation from one modern language to another, let alone ancient Sumerian to modern English. There is, of course, an XKCD about the additional effect (https://xkcd.com/794/) when you're dealing with a completely different cultural background. It's even possible that joke technology has simply improved in the last couple of millennia; I can't remember where I read it, but I do remember reading a fairly compelling case that the art of fiction-writing has got noticeably better over the last 500 years or so.

Depends on the kind of joke. Stuff that's a reference to a pretty universal life experience tends to survive pretty well. Stuff based on double meanings or phonetics generally fares poorly.

>I do remember reading a fairly compelling case that the art of fiction-writing has got noticeably better over the last 500 years or so.

I've thought about this a bit since I've been trying to break into fiction writing. The thing I noticed, imagine how incredibly painful it was to edit your first draft back in the day. In comparison, these days we have month long contests (for fun) to write 50,000 word novels. Even though these are typically terrible, there are some that do get published and people enjoy. These stories are edited heavily. Not just grammar or spelling. Scenes are re-written. Added. Removed. Paragraphs moved. Erased. Added. Find/Replace to change a name. Etc. It's barely an inconvenience to do this on the computer. That's not easily the case with handwritten or typewritten pages. You end up re-typing it all out to see the next draft, just to notice how you need to butcher more of it and do it all over again. Page reformatting by itself is a God send.

I think modern writers are able to revise their work more often and easily in far, far less time. Just one example, I type about 3-5 times faster than handwriting. That iteration process builds up more skill, thus, better writers. Old school writers, especially pre-typewriter, probably went, "First draft is the only draft" more often than we think (minus minor corrections of course). I think the typewriter allowed the feasibility of multiple drafts without losing your damn mind, but the word processor makes it almost normal practice for many pro-writers to have 10+ drafts. Some even do full rewrites for their second or even third draft NORMALLY.

At that, the amount of professional stories someone would hear or read was minimal too. Most things were new to people even if you weren't original. These days, everyone has a huge backlog of stories they've read/heard over the years. Probably one year of someone's entertainment consumption was a lifetime over 100 years ago. I read somewhere that the average well-educated person (not scholar) in the 1700-1800s read in a month what average folks today (not even well educated) read/hear in about a day. Another example, if you want to make a comedy show, you have to see if Simpsons, Futurama, South Park or Family Guy already did the same gag because people will go, "You're unoriginal". Even South Park had an episode that Simpsons "already did it", and that was a decade ago. The bar is just super high now because of both storytelling skillsets and expectations from audiences.

Just an observation from an idiot.

>That iteration process builds up more skill, thus, better writers.

this would explain the commonly accepted theory that writers from generations before the personal computer were all crap and cannot match up to the present generation.

>I type about 3-5 times faster than handwriting.

... but can you think at what you are typing 3-5 times faster?

Handwriting is slower than typing but the speed at which you can come up with ideas and expand them in a form suitable to be written should be more or less the same, as a matter of fact having a bottleneck at the final output allows more time for the creative part or just for thinking about which words to use, how to construct the sentence, etc.

I guess it all depends, but - only as a parallel, unrelated example - I didn't mind too much the (good ol') times when the computers were so poorly performing that you had to turn calculation off on spreadsheets (and had to hit F9 from time to time), it somehow gave me the time to get an overall look at what I had just written/changed.

>... but can you think at what you are typing 3-5 times faster？

Do you ever find yourself slowly sounding out the words as you handwrite them?

> has got noticeably better over the last 500 years or so

If you're writing a book longhand, the motivation to not improve it would loom very large.

Knock knock

Who's there

Tu who?

Tutankhamen!

This one was all the rage in the New Kingdom.

One I alway used to get the kids with..."I heard a great knock knock joke ok...you start." It only works a couple times, but the slow realization they're stuck and what's happened is always entertaining.

Well, it's the oldest writing than can (with some fantasy) be interpreted as a joke. It's not the best one ever told in human history, which I would consider more interesting, but also harder to find.

I'd also guess, depending on the measure, the best joke is yet to come.

Boffins have done research on this a bunch of times[1][2][3].

Average length of best jokes is 103 (exactly) words by the way, as explained by Richard Wiseman to Sean Moncrieff at the 7m45s mark of this Newstalk radio-show segment[4].

Anyway … the scientifically proven funniest joke in the world is:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He's not breathing and his eyes are glazed, so his friend calls 911. "My friend is dead! What should I do?" The operator replies, "Calm down, sir. I can help. First make sure that he's dead." There's a silence, then a loud bang. Back on the phone, the guy says, "Ok, now what?"

===

[1] “The Complexity of Jokes Is Limited by Cognitive Constraints on Mentalizing” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-015-9251-6

[2] “In 2001, I teamed up with the British Science Association to carry out ‘LaughLab’ – the scientific search for the world’s funniest joke.” https://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/research/laughlab/

[3] “It's not just the way you tell 'em: researchers find the official 50 funniest jokes of all time” https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1322475/Researchers...

[4] “The Funniest Joke Ever” https://www.newstalk.com/joke

> ...funniest joke in the world...

Where "world" is USA, Mexico and Canada.

> It's not the best one ever told in human history, which I would consider more interesting, but also harder to find.

well the funniest religious joke is from Emo Phillips https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/sep/29/comedy.religio...

Sure. Its observational humor but it counts.

If it's lost in translation, the joke is about how absurd the denial can get. "Nope...never happened!"

Sumerian Seinfeld.

"Is that the best you can come up with Jerry? What will people think of it in 4,000 years? You sure you want to write it down? What about the thing you did about Babum's small hands? That was funny. People will understand that one in the future."

Joke technology sure has improved in 4000 years and with a vastly larger population with more leisure time!

I’m sure the punchline to the actual oldest joke is “Hello Hungry, nice to meet you, my name is Dad.”

It is likely something that took place in even the oldest family groups. And I expect it’s probably also used in the animal kingdom.

that this joke works seems to be a weird ambiguity of the English language. Do you know other languages where you can make this joke?

It works in any language where names are a property of objects. There may be some languages where names and adjectives are always explicitly handled differently, but amongst the biggest language groups this does not appear to be the case.

Maybe I didn't understand what joke are you referring to... is the punchline an answer to "I'm hungry"? If that is the case, there is no name here. In all non-english languages that I know, this sentence has not the same form as "I'm Hungry". For example in French it is "J'ai faim" (literally "I have hunger"), in spanish it can be "Tengo hambre" o "estoy hambriento"; if it was a name it would have different grammar: "Je suis Faim" or "Soy Hambriento". In most romance languages it will be similar. How is it in Russian, Arabic, Chinese?

There's nothing specific about hunger, it's just a common example. It's just a response to I am [descriptive adjective] where the adjective is deliberately misinterpreted as a proper name. So it could be "Hi tired, I'm Dad" or "Hi bored, I'm Dad" etc.

Ugh, Ngh and Rgh walks into the cave...

Petros/Petrus jokes in the bible?

Is it really fart or did they mean queef?

Women fart. (Something I thought I'd never have to say.)

I don't think GP was suggesting women don't fart. It's a relevant question.

Pretty sure they are trying to finger out if there's a chance of mistranslation or an extra layer of pun to it.

I am sure that "finger" is not a Freudian slip.

Sadly, that joke will not last for 4,000 years :)

This literally made my wife laugh out loud.

Interestingly, I tried to track down something more scholarly because I think you're asking a fair question. I couldn't actually find anything.

This was the closest I could find:

https://janes.scholasticahq.com/article/2238.pdf

It doesn't really answer your question although it does point to a genre of Sumerian humor involving sexual disgust. Some of the lines are vaguely similar to the one in the article.

That's a relevant question. "In her husband's lap" could be interpreted as girl-on-top, making pretty good odds for hilarious noises. I'd be interested to know how they did the translation.

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