Jokes that have made people laugh for thousands of years
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468098
A favorite:
A provincial man has come to Rome, and walking on the streets was drawing everyone's attention, as he was a real double of the emperor Augustus. The emperor, having brought him to the palace, looks at him and then asks: "Tell me, young man, did your mother come to Rome anytime?" The reply was: "She never did. But my father frequently was here."EDIT: Apparently the emperor is asking to see if they share parents, and not to see whether the emperor is his father, as I originally thought.
The answer suggests that it was his Father that had sex with the mother of Augustus.
It's funny because there's a lot more tension associated with the current Emperor having been fathered by the "wrong" person than, under the original assumption, that some rube from the country was fathered by the Emperor's father.
Well that depends on what happens next, but ending up being thrown to the lions would take the shine of the "clever" part
But don't loose sight that this humor was a way of people to get their frustrations with the emperor out and let the little guy win.
Looks like making a joke at the expense of people-in-power has always been funny.
> here are two ways a joke can fail: it can be too bland or too offensive.
In comedy shows, I find most jokes that get laughs/laugh-tracks are just offensive to someone.
I guess it depends on the age difference between the man and the emperor but I assumed the emperor was referring to himself and the joke was about the emperor's wife or partner.
(This joke is clearly about the emperor's mother, though).
I want to check if it's funny. (The only Latin that ever made me laugh - cry, in fact - was 'Romani eunt domus' in Monty Python's "Life of Brian"...)
> Soleo in Augusto magis mirari quos pertulit iocos quam ipse quos protulit, qui maior est patientiae quam facundiae laus, maxime cum aequanimiter aliqua etiam iocis mordaciora pertulerit. Cuiusdam provincialis iocus asper innotuit. Intraverat Romam simillimus Caesari et in se omnium ora converterat. Augustus perduci ad se hominem iussit, visumque hoc modo interrogavit: Dic mihi, adolescens, fuit aliquando mater tua Romae? Negavit ille, nec contentus adiecit: Sed pater meus saepe.
In August I am always more surprised at those jokes he bore than those he himself uttered, who has greater praise for patience than for eloquence, especially when he bore with equanimity even some of the more biting jokes. A rough joke of a provincial became known. He had entered Rome, most like Caesar, and had turned the mouths of all on him. Augustus ordered the man to be brought to him, and it seemed as if he asked in this manner: Tell me, young man, was your mother at any time in Rome? He denied it, nor was content with it, but added, "But my father often."
This is not how Roman succession worked. Especially at this time. This is a joke about the first Emperor Augusts. His biological father, whilst being pretty important politically, was not the reason he was able to turn himself into Emperor. A very basic explanation was that he got much of his power base from Julius Ceaser, who had adopted him, when he died.
So his biological father having any other children (which he in fact did have, an elder sister, who's own Son entered politics) would not matter at all. As the relationship with his maternal Uncle was where he drew his power.
This is all simplified, and I am no expert. But it is all much more complicated, and interesting (and always has been) than some simple rule of eldest son gets the throne.
Nah man... Your Dad (Emperor) didn't bang my Mom (Plebian).
My Dad (Plebian) BANGED YOUR MOM!!! (Empress probably)
Augustus' parents were not emperor/empress--he was the first person to have that title.
Speaking of his mother Atia though, she was the niece of the Gaius Julius Caesar, himself from a patrician family.
The formal distinction between the family orders waned in significance over the centuries preceding the fact. That said, people always find new ways to feel superior to other people so it's not like there were no class distinctions, but the term plebeian was quite more complicated and nuanced than our modern re-interpretation of the word.
> An intellectual got a slave pregnant. At the birth, his father suggested that the child be killed. The intellectual replied: "First murder your own children and then tell me to kill mine!"
The rest are fairly amusing, or I can at least appreciate what the joke is, but this one I have nothing. I guess it must be something about the intellectual being among the father's children, but that doesn't really seem to add anything?
(thanks for the list by the way, really interesting)
The jokes often reference their parents or classmates.
It made the joke above make sense to me, once I realized that.
A father advised a pedant who had a child born to him of a slave woman to do away with the child. He replied "First bury your own children before you advise me to do away with mine."
You could probabaly make it a little more sarcastic: "Why don't you bury..." I assume the pedant is an adult, and cannot be killed lawfully, so burial is way off in the future. And once the pedant is buried, he cannot kill his own child.
It rings a little like a more vulgar versions of the saying of Jesus, "remove the plank from your own eye..."
Sounds like a clever way to say: "Over my dead body." Considering he's saying this to his own father.
Ancient Greece is sometimes associated with pederasty [0], where adult men have sex with younger (teen-aged) boys.
GP wrote:
> I don't think that would work in Greek.
IIUC, GP's point was that commenting the word "came" is ambiguous in English, but not in the joke's original language.
My pun was that there are two ways to interpret "that wouldn't work in Greek". The first being what GP meant. The second being that if a Greek man were to ejaculate when in Rome, it "wouldn't work" to father anyone, because it would be anal sex, and therefore unlikely to impregnate their partner.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece
I very much hope you chose that word intentionally.
(Warning: NSFW content)
After a little more reading, I get the impression that while pedastry may have been common for ancient Greek philosophers, it may have taken a form other than anal sex.
IIUC, in their society, anal sex (with anyone, including women) was considered vulgar. At least according to their surviving writings; no idea about common practice.
Disclaimer: Not my area of expertise. I'm just going from a few additional resources I found on the topic.
Sadly it wouldn't work in the German translation. As "came here frequently" with would be grammatically correct (in German) as "came to here frequently".
"Hier gekommen" (came here) and "hier her gekommen" (came to here) differ. One would need to translate it more freely and that would probably loose the raunchyness.
"But my father often spent the night in Rome."
"But my father often sampled Rome's pleasures."
Or something alike.
Translation: Wouldn't work because it doesn't include the second meaning of "has come here many times". At least not if you wanted it to be grammatically correct.
If I were writing that joke, I'd avoid the word "came" entirely for precisely that reason. If I were performing it in a show and had to stick to the script, I'd shade the sentence in a way that took the emphasis off the word. (The key word in the gag is "father".)
That's just my opinion, of course. You tell your jokes any way you like. I'm just speaking from my experience as a Shakespeare actor, where a lot of my effort is finding ways to help guide an audience through a text that is well-crafted but intricate, and the real meaning is sometimes obscured.
And his non-biological father is the one that regularly went out to the city ( not to cheat)
Correct?
So more like a brainteaser than a joke, i guess.
You shave your head to conceal your baldness. How will you conceal your impotence?
Two men were walking along a road talking of this and that. "What do you think," says one. "Which is more fun, defecating or having sex?"
The guy says, "Let's ask that prostitute, she's done one as often as the other." Upon being asked, the prostitute laughs in their faces. "Either you two don't know how to fuck, or I don't know how to shit!" What’s the difference between a corn farmer with Tourette’s and a hooker with dysentery?
One shucks between fits.It's like trying to evaluate Renaissance paintings, but not wanting to see a naked human body in the process.
The article also goes into this:
>And what about the contemporary panic about "cancel culture" in comedy? For McGraw, this is not such a unique moment in history.
"This phenomenon has been happening ever since there has been stand-up comedy," he says. As the two jesters from Richard I's court demonstrate, comedy has always been risky, and the power has always ultimately rested with the audience.
"What is wrong and what is OK is determined not by the teller, but by the audience member, by the receiver, and by their mood, the context they're in, the number of drinks they've had, their culture, their identity," continues McGraw.
If the power rests with the audience, the comedian has a tricky task in pleasing them. Stand-up comedian Catherine Bohart knows this pressure well. "The psychology of an audience is really interesting because [if] you seem fine, they are willing to trust you," she says. "But if you are being vulnerable, they can sniff out that anxiety and vulnerability."
In our current times (in western society (vocal middle class)) free speech isn't actually valued as much as say 50 years ago. Since the beginning of multiple apparent crises (massive wealth inequality, Trump, Covid, Ukraine ...) freedom of expression gets (carefully) weight against other things which are perceived as more important. Historically (i.e. in practice) once "lines" get drawn this fine thread evolves into an ideological battlefield.
To appreciate free speech in its fullest requires the leisure of meta-reasoning, unfortunately once insights are established they also suffer from a decay rate (proportional to the magnitude of disruptions into the cohesive fabric of societies) - if not activley reinforced - and then have to be relearned (the hard way) after the turbulent times of societal changes subside.
Because "fake news" is put in new convincing and startling clothes when narratives taken for granted crumble, to cancel something is then just burying it mindlessly, it doesn't at all address the underlying issues.
As I'm reading "The Sleepwalkers" (1932) by Hermann Broch anew this isn't something peculiar to our times as the book covers three time periods (1888, 1903, 1918) in then Europe/Germany elegantly intertwining the recurring motive of sleepwalking into deeply uncertain and unsettling times. Lucidity is few and and far between and mostly if at all acknowledged after the fact (which is a carefully constructed cue to the observant reader of 1932).
In particular:
>> once insights are established they also suffer from a decay rate (proportional to the magnitude of disruptions into the cohesive fabric of societies) - if not activley reinforced - and then have to be relearned (the hard way) after the turbulent times of societal changes subside.
I'm intrigued - although not completely sold - by this idea that rather than a pendulum swinging too far one way and too far the other, we're actually regressing and forgetting hard-won liberties (and the skills most people need to reason with why those liberties are necessary). If that's so, it's more like we're entering a mini (or who knows, not so mini) dark age, right?
#45. An intellectual during the night ravished his grandmother and for this got a beating from his father. He complained: “You’ve been mounting my mother for a long time, without suffering any consequences from me. And now you’re mad that you found me screwing your mother for the first time ever!”
#69. An intellectual checked in on the parents of a dead classmate. The father was wailing: “O son, you have left me a cripple!” The mother was crying: “O son, you have taken the light from my eyes!” Later, the intellectual suggested to his friends: “If he were guilty of all that, he should have been cremated while still alive.”
#73. The same intellectual said that the tomb of Scribonia was handsome and lavish, but that it had been built on an unhealthy site.
#234. A man with bad breath asked his wife: “Madame, why do you hate me?” And she said in reply: “Because you love me.”
Source: https://diotima-doctafemina.org/translations/greek/45-jokes-...
Ma mère m'a donné cent sous pour m'acheter des bretelles
J'ai gardé mes cent sous pour aller au bordel
Chemin faisant, j'ai rencontré grand-mère
Où vas-tu mon enfant, je m'en vais au bordel
Garde donc tes cent sous, je ferai bien l'affaire
J'ai gardé mes cent sous et j'ai baisé grand-mère
Chemin rentrant j'ai rencontré mon père
D'où viens-tu mon enfant, je viens de baiser grand-mère
Enfant de salaud, tu viens de baiser ma mère
Salaud toi-même, t'as bien baisé la mienne
My mother gave me a fiver to buy suspenders
I saved the money to go to the whorehouse instead
Along the way, I met Grandma
Where are you going she said; I said I'm going to the whorehouse
Keep your money, I'll do it for free
I kept the money and fucked grandma
On the way home I met my father
What's up said my father; I just fucked grandma, said I
Son of a bitch! you fucked my mother
SOB yourself, you fucked mineUnderneath in different handwriting was "Go home Dad, you're pissed" [drunk].
Also: I'm curious why you translated 'bordel' as 'whorehouse' rather than 'brothel', as the latter seems etymologically related.
Whorehouse sounds more idiomatic to me than "brothel", especially in a popular song like this one; brothel to me is a more refined/scholarly word maybe? But I may be wrong, I'm not a native English speaker.
> #234. A man with bad breath asked his wife: “Madame, why do you hate me?” And she said in reply: “Because you love me.”
For max discernability: Breathe some fresh outside air to clear your nose, go to a non windy area and do a french inhale of your own breath (sans cigarette smoke of course).
Nevertheless... Asking my wife "do i smell from my mouthhole" works best.
On re-read, it seems that it might be even ironic - a supposed intellectual saying something dumb?
I wonder if there are real examples of jokes that have remained funny for thousands of years. There are ancient comedic writings like the Greek comedies, but from the little I've read of those the humor doesn't really come across either, at least in modern English, though it's also clearly heavily scatalogical.
Sumerian dog jokes, or the difficulty of translating dead languages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30752942 - March 2022 (315 comments)
I hope the BBC falls off a cliff
One of the funnier ones is the Millers Tale (from Wikipedia; spoilers!):
That same night, Absolon comes to the house and begs Alisoun to kiss him. At first she refuses, but Absolon persists, so she offers him one quick kiss. Instead of presenting her lips to Absolon, though, she sticks her backside out the bedroom's "shot-window" (privy vent), and Absolon kisses her "ers" (arse) in the dark. Angry at being fooled, Absolon gets a red-hot coulter from the blacksmith, with which he intends to burn Alisoun in revenge. He returns with it to the window and knocks again, promising Alisoun a gold ring in exchange for a kiss. This time, Nicholas, having gotten up to relieve himself anyway, sticks his buttocks out to get in on the joke and farts thunderously in Absolon's face. Absolon thrusts the coulter "amidst the ers" of Nicholas who cries out for "Water!" to assuage the pain.
Asked by the court barber how he wanted his hair cut, the king replied: "In silence".
I think I first saw it in the book "The Naked Jape".
> People who start a joke and don't finish it are the worst
Used to be someone thought you were funny, they could just throw you a tip. Now you need to worry if Paypal and Patreon think you're acceptable as well. It's like the internet is the king's court, or at least some duke's or other, and his ministers would like you to consider the message your standup is sending to the people.
Two men had been ridiculing the king at a drunken feast – the king was furious and summoned the men. Clearly disaster was about to befall the men, but then one of them answered: 'We might have said those things, but that was nothing to what we were going to say if the wine hadn't run out!'
(For those who don't know, I'll save you a google: epigrams were short poems that were lighthearted and often made fun of people using dry classical humor.)
gets me everytime
The quality of the joke isn't much higher, as it turns out.
Are Europeans allowed to say anything at all?