Old jokes
dynomight.net
dynomight.net
I thumbed through The Frogs (Aristophanes) at a used book store once. This play was written circa 400 BC. In the prologue, one character is offering to entertain the audience with a few jokes, and another character says, "Yes, but not 'That's what she said.'" The joke was too over-used.
I was astounded to think that the joke was that old! But it's actually not. The old jokes of ancient Athenians were a little too obscure, I guess, so the translator picked a modern example. Still, that translation of The Frogs is from the 1950s, so the joke was old at least that far back. (Here is the translation: https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.65406/2015.6540...)
1908 - "Not "Oh, my poor blisters!" - https://archive.org/details/frogstranslatedi00arisuoft/page/...
1995 - "Anything but “What a strain!”" https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
Original greek - "πλήν γ᾽ ‘ὡς θλίβομαι.’" - https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text...
This appears to translate as "except 'as I grieve.'" according to Google Translate - https://translate.google.com/?sl=el&tl=en&text=πλήν%20γ᾽%20‘...
That Perseus link will give you dictionary entries for the words. Relevant glosses of ὡς appear to be "as; how; so; thus". θλίβομαι is the passive form of a verb meaning "press; squeeze" and metaphorically "oppress; afflict"; examples in the Great Scott (LSJ) show it being used to describe a shoe pinching a foot, a shoulder rubbing against a narrow doorway, lips pressing against each other in a kiss, and the circumstances of poverty making things difficult for a poor person.
So it's easy to imagine that it might feature in the punchline of a pun. But even without constructing a pun, it would be easy to translate that as something like "see how I suffer?", which could be the punchline to any number of jokes. It sounds like a good translation of the modern punchline "first world problems", for example.
I've been having stomach pains all week but finally managed a bowel movement this morning. What a strain!
Looking back, I think this idea was somehow rooted in the idea that jokes have delivery and that if you use that delivery (rythmn, emphasis, body language) maybe you could say anything and be funny. There was also the peer effect - if you had an audience "plant" in the school yard that would start the laughter, sometimes it would catch even for these non-jokes.
Decades later, the idea I described above seems both obviously false, but also true, in the sense that a lot of modern stand up is based on "say anything the right way and people laugh". However, "the right way" for standup is very different than the "telling a joke" structure.
On the other hand, it does feel to me at this point that this is the crux of the contemporary poetry slam: read an arbitrary text in the right way, and while it may not win any prizes, it will feel like poetry, because that's what make it poetry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_soap_radio#Execution_of_the...
What did the farmer say when he walked outside and saw that his tractor was gone?
Damn it. My tractor is gone.
You might enjoy the work of Andy Kaufman.
Edit: I guess it‘s the same formula as most jokes: There is some logic in the setup, and the punchline replaces it with a different logic or pattern. Only in this case, the original logic isn‘t common sense, but the expected pattern of each type of joke. A meta-joke in that regard. It really depends on you being blindsided, but immediately recognizing the new “logic“ at the punchline.
Non-jokes or meta-jokes break the expectation but in an unusual way. "Why did the chicken cross the road?" punchline breaks your expectation of an broken expectation. You thought it was a joke, but it turned out to be a statement. The aristocrats joke turns out to be just a dirty story- the story is the "joke".
Memes are not non-jokes or meta jokes. Memes are refillable jokes in a known container. You see the picture, you know what the joke is. Just like a TV sitcom is storytelling/joketelling in a refillable container. You see the kooky friend character, you know how he/she is going to react.
The aristocrats joke happens to also be a refillable container (you can tell/retell it however you want), but that's not the part that makes it a non-joke.
So the chicken joke is not necessarily an anti-joke.
Thank you for enlightening me.
Other people say things funny."
Both can be equally comedic. Looks like you and your friends discovered that.
I was watching The Flying Karamazov Brothers performing their amazing comedy juggling act on stage, when they suddenly all messed up at once and dropped their pins, which caused the entire audience to burst out in uproarious laughter.
Taken aback, they asked the audience: "Are you laughing AT US or WITH IS?"
The audience unanimously replied together at once: "AT YOU!!!"
They smugly shouted back: "Gesundheit!!!"
There is no single correct chicken crossing the road joke, but specifically the person you're talking to is speaking about an anti-joke where you don't even get to it crossing the road because you're stuck on the question of why cross the road rather than the act of crossing it.
It's just entirely plausible to me that the pun was just a "happy accident", and the originator of the joke really did mean to give a groan-inducing borderline-tautological answer that does not offer any insight besides the obvious. You were expecting a punchline, but your expectation was subverted!
And at least that's also funnier than that lame pun. I'd be pretty disappointed to be honest, but we'll probably never really find out.
I'm absolutely certain he's wrong
Some jokes simply don't mean anything
Geese on the other hand seem convinced they are tougher than anything with four wheels.
Reminds me of the Code Geass abridged series Code MENT (most famously known for the Soup Store[0] meme) which relies on this type of humor heavily. Most of the jokes in it aren't really funny on their own and are essentially just nonsensical statements delivered in strange and distinctive ways rapid fire while VERY loosely related to the plot of Code Geass. But with the right delivery the lines become hilarious and easily quotable: just look at how many Soup Store parodies there are.
This is “Friends” summed up. We are only laughing because they tell something like it was funny, and the canned laughter tells our brain to laugh.
Are you not aware that the show was filmed before a live audience? Watch how the actors pause between lines - they're actually waiting for the crowd to finish laughing. And that's the case for most sitcoms from the previous century.
It might not be your kind of humor. But real audiences found the show funny enough to laugh so long and hard, when they were under no obligation to do so, that the actors had to have unnaturally long pauses between their lines.
Many modern internet commenters have a misguided tendency to automatically dismiss any show with a laugh track as inferior. FWIW I think Friends was a great show for most of its run, with top-notch comic writing, within the constraints of the medium at the time. Sitcoms were nearly always single-camera format, and shot in a studio with a live audience. The storylines had to be accessible to casual watchers. The shows lived and died by weekly ratings, and needed to have ad breaks at specific times, which also influenced the writing, casting, and pacing.
Just to show you that I'm not swayed by mere laugh tracks and longevity, let me also announce that anything made by Chuck Lorre is absolute drivel.
How many pancakes does it take to shingle a roof?
Orange, because snakes don't have armpits!
"Why do ocean liners have 3 big chimneys? Because Transatlantic!"
You could replace the question with anything nonsensical. In the comic, a father becomes crazy after his son tells him this joke. He just wants to understand it so bad...
A: Two: one to hold the giraffe, and one to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine pieces.
Q: What's the difference between a duck?
A: One of its legs are the same.
Penguin jokes are even funnier when monkeys tell and laugh at them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTQMRC5Pm6k
Joking aside, this is Marvin Minsky's paper "Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious", published in Cognitive Constraints on Communication, Vaina and Hintikka (eds.) Reidel, 1981:
https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt
>Abstract: Freud's theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental "censors" that make it hard for us to think "forbidden" thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay I argue that the different forms of humor can be seen as much more similar, once we recognize the importance of knowledge about knowledge and, particularly, aspects of thinking concerned with recognizing and suppressing bugs -- ineffective or destructive thought processes. When seen in this light, much humor that at first seems pointless, or mysterious, becomes more understandable.
[...]
>ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: I thank Howard Cannon, Danny Hillis, William Kornfeld, David Levitt, Gloria Rudisch, and Richard Stallman for suggestions. Gosrdon Oro provided the dog-joke.
I vividly remember sitting in the back of my mothers car with a friend and just losing it for laughter. It was uncontrollable and my mother was rather annoyed.
It's almost sad that it doesn't work at all anymore.
It's a collection of jokes (apparently) written by children. They aren't funny, in the sense that they make no damn sense. Yet, lots of them are funny in the sense that they are completely ridiculous but you can see what the child was trying to do, i.e. deliver a joke in the same style as they have heard before, e.g.
Knock, knock
Who's there?
A ladybug.
Ladybug who?
A LADYBUG. I just SAID that. whats a fish with no eyes.
dead
"A train" (context, in the Netherlands all the large intercity trains are yellow)
My favorite was "A patron sees a whale sitting in a booth at the bar". You go on and on about him coming back day after day seeing the wale, describing the beverage, etc. Just improv it. The key is going as long as you can while keeping the audience, but still getting that frustration and tension from them.
At the end the patron gets up the courage to talk to the whale explains to the whale that he had seen him for days, was amazed, etc. Then the whale looked at him and responded [insert best whale noise impression].
Since he passed I've seen a bunch of Norm Macdonald videos of this. He really was the best. The moth joke and others that go on for ~30 mins each on Conan are amazing.
He plays them dumb but is basing them off like Russian literature tropes that go way over the audience's head. The repeated build up, let down, and then finally just a silly punch line that could have landed in 3 sentences is incredible. And his ability to play off Conan's occasional shots...
It's one of my favorite categories of joke. It gets even better if you can retell it to intersecting groups of people, as the people who have heard it before are now "in on it." They can see you leading the audience on a wild goose chase and will react with amusement throughout, increasing the excitement of the fresh audience and making the punchline (or lack thereof) all the better.
... this one can be extended for 30 minutes ...
Maybe they should have given him a name and used that instead of "conductor", and only refer to him as a conductor 3-4 times throughout the story.
One week, a friend and I ran the activity “Friend and greggyb tell a joke.” We strung together a half dozen of our favorite shaggy dog stories, interweaving them and putting off the combined punch line until the last ten minutes of the third day. We handed off to one another every 15-20 minutes. At the end, the 30 or so campers agreed that they could not be angry with us, because we did exactly what the activity said, we told _A_ joke.
A whale sitting at the bar says: [long whale noise]. The barman replies: "go home, Frank, you're drunk".
A similar one is:
A monkey eats some soup at a restaurant, and says: [monkey noise]. The waiter replies: "be careful, sir, it's very hot".
> At the end the patron gets up the courage to talk to the whale explains to the whale that he had seen him for days, was amazed, etc. Then the whale looked at him and responded [insert best whale noise impression].
This made me laugh more than is reasonable.
Two canadians are paddling a canoe across a vast hot walmart parking lot.
One of them turns to the other and says
"Where's the paddles, Eh?"
His buddy replies
"Eh, sure does."
Two seals are sitting in a bathtub full of warm crisco.
One of them turns to the other and says
"Hey, could you pass the soap?"
and the other answers
"What do I look like, a typewriter?"
Two elephants are sitting in a tub. The one elephant says to the other, "Pass the soap." The other elephant says, "No soap. Just radio." Get it?
And then her and my mom would laugh, and wait for me to do the same. The joke being that anyone not in on it who laughs is faking. The joke is on them.
'Twas my fav joke.
Edit: saw a link - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32250203
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/9a7k0p/c...
I don’t like it when people act as if these were objectively bad jokes. Many jokes are very dependent on a specific cultural moment as well as carefully crafted wording. Lots of current jokes fall can flat if you slightly change the phrasing, even if they aren’t word play. And then there’s delivery, pacing, knowing your audience…
Surely widespread literacy and technology allow modern people to develop comparably sophisticated tastes just by the sheer wealth of entertainment we consume, but people 5000 years ago were still people and I’m sure they found humour in similar places as we do.
edit: here’s a source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-joke-odd-idUSKUA147851200... Again, I would take issue with the reduction to “toilet humour”. Clearly the comedy of manners aspect plays the larger role, even if farts are somehow eternally funny.
Internet humor is big on surreal non-sequiturs. I suspect that while it may have existed as a style of humor before the internet, that it may not have existed 3000 years ago as a style of humor.
Another thing to consider apart from cultural differences and translations is that a lot can go wrong betwen a hit joke being told and a scribe getting around to immortalising it. It’s obviously a game of telephone. Comedy is a craft and written comedy is different from stage comedy. I can imagine a joke absolutely killing at the end of a stand-up set, but falling flat when told in isolation, because it was a call-back or otherwise profited from a primed audience. It’s quite likely that someone might naively retell only the bit that got the laughs and only then realise their mistake. Or the shared experience of the audience might elevate a bit to an in-joke that is only funny to them because they know the rest. Decades later, only the devolved memes that obliquely reference this shared knowledge survive in writing and future generations are left wondering what was wrong with their ancestors’ odd humour.
Here’s hoping future generations will be aware of Douglas Adams’ work, but it seems entirely possible that in a thousand years, people will speculate why our we found towels or the number 42 so funny.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_S
Oh, that is so true... here in germany there is (or better was) the category of the "Mantawitze" (Manta jokes... the Opel Manta was a car that was liked in the late 80s early 90s by...special... people with a taste for mullets, western boots and -allegedly- low IQs), that people who werent there at this time simply doesn't understand.
Like the shortest joke of this category: "Steht ein Manta vor der Uni"
A software engineer.
What do you call a software engineer who studies history?
A software engineer.
What do you call a software engineer who sticks to software engineering?
A coder.
This was only a tangent, but I agree with this. I really don't like "cringe" humor.
There seems to be an entire British subgenre catering to that (which apparently the British original of The Office is a part of), and only to that. It's pretty extreme. As far as I know The Office in the US was retooled to be more "funny" than the original, which was apparently just cringe. (Didn't watch it so it was hard to say, but I've tried to watch other similar British shows like that.)
Fortunately it's only a subgenre, because there's plenty of other British comedy that is absolutely, and famously, fantastic... If you haven't watched Coupling, Look Around You, or The Peter Serafinowicz show, you're really missing out!
Couple of great quotes from the Wikipedia page [1] "The Guardian called it "an exquisitely vile comic creation" and adding that "The Office might have popularised the comedy of embarrassment, but Nighty Night has moved it on." The Times called it "a blistering wall of superbly unredeemed cruelty that manages to trample over every social convention in a pair of cheap stilettos."
[0]https://www.google.com/search?q=%22nighty+night%22 [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nighty_Night#Reception
I'm curious: Do you have data you could share around this assertion?
Intuitively, I'd be inclined to bet the opposite. The population of the world has grown significantly; even if the number of "interesting" ambition-satisfying jobs grew at the same rate, there would still be tons more people in an absolute sense who end up stuck in a dead-end job.
(Admittedly, I conflated aspiration with achievement just then, but I'm not sure if there is an empirical difference? If an ambitious person is stuck in a dead-end job for years, then, by definition, they must not be ambitious enough.)
A British comedy series I can recommend wholeheartedly is The IT Crowd (available on Netflix, at least in some countries).
An exemplar of the subgenre "what on earth were they smoking?" is The Mighty Boosh.
I was just in awe that any cast could be that quick, or that any writers could write that stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC7zJP02Pak
It's comedy of the absolutely improbable. The female lead is a young Brenda Blethyn, who of recent years has starred as "Vera", police detective.
The UK Office however, I think is entirely different.
Not a a half bad joke making fun of people who are bad at logic and who doesn't understand cause and effect. Quite a few variants of this joke still exist today. It isn't meant to be funny, so much as it is an example of faulty logic taken to an absurd length.
But this type of pattern matching is something people do all the time, and the results of it are often become baked into cultural traditions. From not having fans on in bedrooms to eating <culturally preferred food> when sick to get better faster. Someone witnessed A, then B, then C happen in rapid succession, so they assume A, B, and C are related to each other.
Some of these are more than just tradition. I'm familiar with having different kinds of soups or maybe eating spicy things. Having soup increases your liquid intake which generally helps your body process stuff (you could of course just drink lots of water, but that's not very culturally significant), spicy things can increase sinus drainage which is helpful too.
At the very end during the big resolution scene, Lafeu declares "Mine eyes smell onions; I shall weep anon."
The printing press was well established in Europe by his time (to preserve any prior art), and Shakespeare had an astounding gift for language.
This is interesting: it's the sort of quip that, if said extemporaneously in conversation, would probably get someone to laugh. The funny thing would specifically be referencing back to a conversation/event that happened a few days ago. The thing that makes it less funny in the compressed form is that you don't have to put the 2 and 2 together of "oh yeah, that's an event that happened a few days ago which is related to this situation" because the compressed joke has spoon-fed you the context.
Maybe jokes were such a novel form at the time that even the compressed form was still funny back then?
Or it may be that the verb "to eat lettuce" sounded just like "to find something around a corner". Jokes tends to exploit peculiar facts of the language, which are mostly specific to the language and cannot be translated.
> I can't find anything, and I don't know what to do!
> Title of your sex tape
And so, "Much Ado About Nothing" doesn't really mean "a lot of fuss for no reason". Or maybe it does, but it carries a strong double entendre: "make noise for the pussy".
Two guys have fast cars and decide one day to have a contest to see whose car is faster. I can't tell you the rest of the joke though. It's racist.
I believe the first place I heard the "Why Thank You" bit was in Police Squad / Naked Gun. The signature "confused guy says something unintentionally funny" humor Leslie Neilsen was known for.
You can enjoy his movies as dumb and silly movies, or you can also enjoy the more clever jokes as well. I definitely did not totally understand everything when I first saw them as a kid.
Bar tender: "A talking seal! I've never seen anything like this. You should go work in a circus!"
Seal: "Why? Does the circus need microservice architects?"
"A dinosaur? on the train? What on earth is happening?"
Dinosaur: "Well, don't get used to it. Tomorrow my car is fixed".
A pilot.
Bartender: hey we have a drink named after you!
Grasshopper, confused: What? Kevin?
Ouch.
Citation needed on that. Certainly it's been attached to the office, but if you've actually watched it you would know that Micheal Scott never invented a new phrase on purpose.
A poster in these very comments admitted to having believed that the joke originated with The Office. I suppose the author's "citation" is that they've personally witnessed this enough times to make an educated guess that it's a fairly widespread belief.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find even a few instances out of the millions of viewers who would have thought Michael Scott invented the phrase.
I just assumed it was hyperbole.
- kevin___
I'd not be a bit surprised if a double-digit percentage of viewers thought the joke originated there.
I guess these days not everyone hears it growing up?
Seems I need to widen my view.
I just asked a few friends if they thought it came from the show or not. The first person that responded thought it had come from the show as well. The second knew the joke hadn't originated from there, but attributed its popularity to appearing on the show.
Haha, I was sure I'd read that post, but had to look for quite a while to find it again, myself, for some reason.
> I guess these days not everyone hears it growing up?
I'm actually not sure I heard it until after it was on The Office and it was suddenly everywhere, constantly. If I did, it wouldn't have been long before that. "Your mom" was big (LOL, yeah she was) when I was a kid, though.
That's what she said
Like when artists cover a song and younger folks don't realize it wasn't the original.
I'll make a mental note to keep in mind I'm old now so as not to become the old man on the porch screaming at kids.
It’s “classic” TV now, and it’s always hard for kids to parse what’s new and a allusion in “classic” TV.
Mullah Nasruddin was traveling when he came to a town. The elders of the town asked him to give a sermon at the temple, which he grudgingly accepted. On the appointed day, he strode to the pulpit and asked the congregation, "Do you know what I'm about to say?" To which they replied, no they did not. He looked at them with disappointment and said, "Well, I'm not going to waste my time talking a bunch of people that don't know what I'm talking about," and left.
Another:
Nasruddin was taking a shortcut through a cemetery, when passed a funeral. Speaking to the mourners, the officiant said, "Today we have buried a politician and a good man." Shocked, Nasruddin said, "I did not know that times were so hard here, that you had to bury a two people in a single grave."
I'm not entirely sure the author understood them.
I'm fairly certain the joke here is something like, "you couldn't have known to say you didn't receive the letter unless you actually did get the letter." I'm guessing the translation isn't helping, but it's actually a pretty routine joke. Not a total failure at all!
Sorry I didn't get back to you with those spreadsheet edits, I must not have gotten your email!
Best, -Joe -- Sent from my iPhone
For context, the joke is set in the Soviet Union
> Russian engineer got fed up of having all responsibility and low salary, so he moves to another city and pretends to be an ordinary worker, same salary and peace of mind. However, not long after communist party sends him to evening classes. On his first day there at maths class he was asked about circle circumference formula, but for some reason he could not remember it off hand, so he goes on blackboard and tries to work it out with linear integral. After exhausting whole blackboard he finally gets the result:
> -2RPi
> Then all of the sudden he hears all of the class whispering to him: "Change the direction of integration!"
I haven't heard this in English now that you say it, but in Spanish it's also a whole category of jokes, just instead of "Cumaeans" it's "Lepe" (a small town).
"Lepe is known for its strawberries, and for Spanish jokes referring to its inhabitants as stupid."
I think the Australians and New Zealanders have the same joking culture between them.
Were Caesar and Henry IV's jesters as hip as Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce? Did Dave Chapelle-level humor exist in earlier centuries? Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy etc. were clearly the pinnacle of humor in their day, yet I find their acts trite and boring. Only "Who's on first?" still works.
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were hip in the 50's. Today they are passé. Is our humor evolving? Are we developing an irreversible, ratcheting level of sophistication? Or was there some ineffable zeitgeist, a quality to the context that we can never recreate?
To pick two TV shows that were popular at the exact same time: the original Bob Newhart Show still totally works, while The Mary Tyler Show is wearing kinda thin.
Newhart deliberately avoided any topical humor in his shows, just for that reason.
Every night before I go to bed, I end the day with, "Hey, Siri, tell me a joke."
Why is Cinderella so bad at soccer?
She keeps running away from the ball.
"My grandfather of 73 y/o didn't fight in WW1 and WW2 to let it come to this!"
"What?? He wasn't even born in WW1, and a toddler in WW2!"
"Like I said, he didn't fight".
Sir Dinadan The Humorist - from A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Mark_Twain/A_Connecticut_Yan...
For instance, there are also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardarji_joke
We'd have to find the original text and consult a translation dictionary, I expect, to figure out exactly which sense was intended.
At its root its a person who doesn't work. A scholar didn't work and could devote their time to acquiring knowledge. But a lazy person could also be a scholastikos.
So I think here it is getting the double treatment, referring to a person who has lots of book smarts but no common sense.
Pedant kind of makes sense as a person who thinks themselves smart, so perfect for being the butt of a joke about being stupid. Pedant, afterall, was once just a word for teacher in English, but has taken on a negative connotation.
> Why enjoy this and not videos of people falling off of skateboards
Because watching people suffer makes me _really_ suffer.
That's why the Office and other Ricky Gervais self-deprecation shows were fun but also very painful. However, his After Life series was incredibly touching. Even thinking about it makes me emotional.
It always confused me. But then again, I was always the one with the sore arm in the end.
I definitely also played the yellow car variant. I assume it's the preferred variant nowadays given how rare bugs are.
When I was young someone told me a very, very similar joke and attributed it to Mark Twain: "We were twins. One of us died. I could never tell if it was my brother or I."
Tom K Elitch, Tomkelitch, Tom Kelitch, Thomas Elitch. Is it just that "Tom Elitch" owns a business on "Broadway" https://clustrmaps.com/a/307mgf/
There's got to be something clever about it unless it's just total nonsense for its own sake. Ineptias ineptias gratia? :D
Touche!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokester
Sadly HN doesn't have a spoiler tag otherwise I could tell you why. You'll just have to click the wiki link.
[1]: https://nitter.net/LinManuelRwanda/status/150564673862708838...
I think some of these things would land differently to an audience more intuitively familiar with these things in their daily lives.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botijo
It doesn't work if you add decoration because it needs transpiration to cool the contents.
I totally missed the pants/pitch joke, good catch. Reminds me of an episode of It's Always Sunny where Frank keeps flushing articles of clothing down the toilet and uses black paint to cover up, except it ends up being a pretext for a later, unrelated bit.
Personally, the idea that someone could invent a basic joke does not make sense to me. People can popularize specific jokes at a specific time but as I see it the jokes themselves are a physical part of the world there to be discovered and only specific detailed phrasing can really be created. Though I guess I would say the same about anything people are said to invent so maybe it is a matter of perspective. Still, I'd be surprised if a good portion of "modern humor" didn't predate homo sapiens as a species.
A dog walked into a tavern and said, 'I can't see a thing. I'll open this one.'
https://popcrush.com/twitter-decipher-punchline-ancient-sume...
> A man asked a friend to buy two 15-year old slaves for him next time he visits the market. After a few days, the friend returns and says: "I couldn't find any 15-year old slaves at the market, so I bought you one 30-year old slave."
“One boy is worth half a man. Two is worth nothing.”
Heard that one after wasting 10 minutes chatting instead of loading the truck.
Schoolkids come back from a trip to the farm and the teacher asks them what they saw. Little Johnny says we saw a chicken and a horse and a pig and a fucker and a cow and ...
Teacher: Johnny! I'm sure the farmer didn't use that language.
Johnny: Yeah he called them 'eifers but we knew what he meant.
Seems like a great way to build a following on TikTok would just be to go through the countless hours of standup comedy that was shown night after night on late night TV in the 50s and 60s, cherry pick the best bits and just start making clips. Even if you were called out for copying, a funny bit is a funny bit. Think of the wealth of material from George Burns, Milton Berle or Carol Burnett that could be reintroduced to the world as 30 second vids.
was around mid-to-late 90s on King of the Hill and I was a teenager. It was an episode where Ben Stiller guest starred as a new employee who worked with Hank Hill at Strickland Propane and the premise was that this new employee (I forget his name) would create a toxic work environment where he'd make crude jokes about everything and everyone and nobody had the balls to stand up to him except for Hank.
Now, given that writer/producer Greg Daniels, worked in both King of the Hill and The Office I figured that maybe he made the joke prominent in the latter show.
But I'm probably wrong.
What the author doesn't get is that those are meant not just as ha-ha jokes, but also as ironic comments on behavior. E.g., his example on this category:
"A pedant was looking for his book for many days but could not find it. By chance as he was eating lettuce and turned a certain corner he saw the book lying there. Later meeting a friend who was lamenting the loss of his girdle, he said, “Do not worry but buy some lettuces and eat them at the corner, when you turn it and go a little ways you fill find it.”
This is an ironic remark on how people think what worked for them circumstancially, it will work for others, even in another situation. E.g. this joke could be used almost verbatim as a ironic critique of modern-day cargo cult of success (where copying BS circumstancial things a rich person does, like "waking up at 6am" or "only eat Soylent to save time") is supposed to be how you find success.
Or take:
"Another person who was going away wrote to a pedant that he should buy him some books. But he regarded the request lightly and said to him on his return, “I did not receive your letter which you sent concerning the books.”"
The joke here is not about "someone saying something dump", but rather poking fun at "the check is in the post" kind of behavior.
Moving on: "Cumaeans are stupid. I’m not sure what the Cumaeans did to deserve this, but there’s a whole section with jokes like this"
The point is not Cumaeans, and those kind of jokes at some group (from the Polish to rednecks) are a staple all across the world - including by those groups made fun of themselves.
Or one he is confused about, which is perfectly clear:
"A pedant had purchased a pair of breeches and since they were very tight and he had difficulty in getting into them, he pulled all the hair off himself."
It just a critique of people doing something supposedly to help with a situation, that actually has zero returns. (the guy couldn't fit in his clothes, so he shaved his body hair - as if that would make much of dent to his body volume).
One can see that there are tons of examples of this behavior in modern life (and, alas, in programming).
The author says he is especially confused about this joke, but the meaning is, once again, totally clear:
"A shrewd fellow whilst wrestling fell into the mud and in order that he might not seem to be clumsy, he got up entirely covered with mud and stood conceitedly through the whole contest."
It's again poking fun at the well known "save face" behavior, that if you accidently fail at something, you can try make it appear like you didn't fail, but rather intended what happened. There are like 100 examples of the same exact behavior in modern comedy movies.
In essense, the author appears to take the jokes too literaly or as actual advice, fails to see their point, and in general appears to be quite the ...pedant, like the butt of some of those jokes!
The one you describe is a classic format: someone has a problem, then through accidental, unrelated circumstances, solves it. They meet someone else with the same problem, and the punchline is that their advice is "have you tried..?"
> A pedant having fallen into a pit called out continually to summon help. When no one answered, he said to himself, “I am a fool if I do not give all a beating when I get out in order that in the future they shall answer me and furnish me with a ladder.”
The author ends being unsure their strategy is sound -- but the point of the joke is that it's clearly not sound, and one that would only make sense to a pedant.
> "Another person who was going away wrote to a pedant that he should buy him some books. But he regarded the request lightly and said to him on his return, “I did not receive your letter which you sent concerning the books.”"
The punchline is that the pedant clearly received the letter, or he wouldn't know to say that the he's claiming to have not received concerned books. Today it might be: "Hey, did you get my text message?" "The one asking if you could borrow my car? No, I didn't."
> It just a critique of people doing something supposedly to help with a situation, that actually has zero returns. (the guy couldn't fit in his clothes, so he shaved his body hair - as if that would make much of dent to his body volume).
I understood this joke differently: You're supposed to pull the breeches to get into them, but the guy pulled his hair instead.
Indeed, that's what's going on in Pohl's "The Day After The Day The Martians Came".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After_the_Day_the_Mart...
Ordinary people are telling ordinary in-group jokes... but now they're about Martians. The joke is invariably that Martians are stupid, dirty, uncivilised etc. One of these people observes to his (we infer black) employee that the discovery of Martian life won't make any "difference to anybody". The employee politely disagrees, pointing out that it already made "a damn big difference to me".
Pohl wrote that in 1960s America.
Q. What did Tarzan say when he saw the elephants coming over the hill?
A. "El-e-phant coming ov-er hill!"
Q. What did he say when saw them coming over the hill with their sunglasses on?
A. He didn't say anything, he didn't recognize them.
We all have both centers, only luck will tell which one is wired up to ”cringe” stimuli.
> A pedant was looking for his book for many days but could not find it. By chance as he was eating lettuce and turned a certain corner he saw the book lying there. Later meeting a friend who was lamenting the loss of his girdle, he said, “Do not worry but buy some lettuces and eat them at the corner, when you turn it and go a little ways you fill find it.”
For instance, I was in a motorcycle accident recently, but also coincidentally got a great deal on a Peloton. Someone asked me how I got it for cheaper and I explained that it involved first learning to ride a motorcycle and then colliding with a car.
Personally, I found the whole thing hilarious, but written down it sounds totally nonsensical, which makes it even funnier.
Oh monk, would you please lend me your robes?
The monk’s reply:
Those who have given up the world wear only a single layer of moss-rough cloth,
yet not to offer it would be heartless.
Let us sleep together, then.”
A poem/joke by Ono no Komachi from c. 825 — c. 900
Along with “And he says, ‘do you love me,’ and she says, ‘no! But that’s a real nice ski mask’”
He didn't invent it, but he brough it back.
The very dark jokes are actually quite funny.
There are a couple great sections in The World as I See it [1]:
> I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.
> A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man
> I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
> I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.
Here's a longer quote that is a little more substantive:
> there is found a third level of religious experience, even if it is seldom found in a pure form. I will call it the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought. He feels the individual destiny as an imprisonment and seeks to experience the totality of existence as a unity full of significance. Indications of this cosmic religious sense can be found even on earlier levels of development—for example, in the Psalms of David and in the Prophets. The cosmic element is much stronger in Buddhism, as, in particular, Schopenhauer's magnificent essays have shown us. The religious geniuses of all times have been distinguished by this cosmic religious sense, which recognizes neither dogmas nor God made in man's image. Consequently there cannot be a church whose chief doctrines are based on the cosmic religious experience. It comes about, therefore, that we find precisely among the heretics of all ages men who were inspired by this highest religious experience; often they appeared to their contemporaries as atheists, but sometimes also as saints.
This is the conception of Mysticism I've tried to describe a bit in the past [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_I_See_It_(book)
15. "Mother, I don't want to marry Ricardo, he says that Hell doesn't exist!". "Calm youself, little daughter, when I am his mother-in-law I will convince him of it".
18. is roughly "In a country it rained (a lot or a little?). One farmer said 'This year, out of the ground will come everthing we put beneath it'. His colleague said 'By God, don't say that, friend! My mother-in-law is down there!'".
21. A widower was showing some friendly guests around his garden. "Look", he said, "There is the tree where my three unhappy wives hanged themselves". One of the attendees, who was a husband, asked for a cutting from the tree - that he might plant it in his garden.
24. A fiance gave confession on the day of his wedding. Afterwards he said "Father, you forgot to give me the punishment". "No", said the clever priest, "you already have it".
30. "See that man? I hate him". "Why?". "He asked before me for my wife's hand, and she refused him!".
78. "Dear friend, why don't you want your son to marry?". "I don't want my wife to become a mother-in-law".
90. "How is your mother-in-law doing?". "She's getting better, but I haven't lost all hope."
96. A servant calls to his sleeping master 'Sir! Sir! Your mother-in-law just died!'. "Oh! How much sadness I will have in the morning when I wake from this dream" replied the son-in-law.
Some are plausible jokes but not very funny. e.g.
14. "Waiter, Omelette!", "We have none". "Meat?" "Also none". "Fish?" "Also none". "So why say one can eat according to their desires?" "Sir, it means the desire of the restaurant owner".
29. "The drum you sold me makes no sound". "I hoped as much". "And why do you make drums?" "To sell them".
35. "Is God everywhere?" "Yes, father". "Then he is in the yard of your house?". "No, father". "Why not, stupid boy?". "My house doesn't have a yard, respected teacher."
Some are reasonable:
19. In a Barber's shop: "How would you like me to shave you?" "Silently".
10. A 60 year old woman and her daughter looks the same age. "One claims they are two daughters" says the census taker, "but you could more rightly say they are two mothers".
71. "It'd be a miracle if I win the lottery." "What's your number?" "None." "Then how will you be able to win?". "That's why I said it would be a miracle!".
That one can be traced back to Cicero:
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Gesta_Romanorum_Vol._I_(187...
...that's what she said.
Wondering what to do with your life? Here’s what I suggest:
First priority: Your physical health. (No health → no life.)
Second priority: Reasonable financial security. (No food → no health.)
Third priority: Good relationships with friends and family. (Depressed → no mental health.)
After that you can do whatever. The game you’re playing doesn’t have any rules and there’s no way to win.