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