All puns blazing: What makes a good joke?

It’s not always easy to spot the joke, in humour that comes down to us from the ancient world.

In fact, some ancient jokes can seem so unfunny that researchers have had to define clear outlines: if a clear setup-and-punchline structure are present, one may simply assume that one is looking at a joke.

Take the world’s oldest-known quip. It comes to us from Ancient Sumeria, and was found on a tablet dating to 1900 BCE. It consists of just one line: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman farting in her husband’s lap.”
Not at all funny today, it was clearly considered rip-roaring enough to be noted, with great effort, for posterity. Ancient jokes have also been uncovered on sheets of papyrus, ancient scrolls, within works of canonical literature, and in the margins of serious texts.
In general, lechery, innuendo, puns, sex and relationships have been common themes through history, a 2008 study by researchers at University of Wolverhampton found.
Among these are common types of jokes that remain endearingly universal.
Take the kind of quip now called an Essex Girl joke, which essentially hinges on shared ideas about people from a certain region. (Essex girls, in jokes, are said to be silly and shallow, among other things. Therefore: “Why do Essex girls drive VWs? Because they can’t spell Porsche.”)
Another universal format turns out to be the “My friend went to Athens and all I got was this T-shirt” one. A Latin inscription on a 2,000-year-old iron stylus says more or less this. Dated to c. 70 CE Roman London, it reads: “I have come from the City. I bring you a welcome gift with a sharp point that you may remember me.”
Bawdy innuendo seems to have been pervasive through the ages.
There was one told, in his time, about the Roman emperor Augustus (63 BCE to 14 CE). A young man arrived in Rome who looked just like him, it went. Even the emperor could see that the likeliness was uncanny. So Augustus asked the man: “Did your mother ever come to Rome?” “No,” he replied, “but my father did.”
Fast-forward about 1,500 years, and we have the earliest surviving joke in Old English, dating to the late-10th century CE: “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before?” “A key.”
Funny side up
What many of the jokes share is a willingness to deal with taboos, and speak with a degree of rebellion, Paul McDonald, the senior lecturer at Wolverhampton’s School of Social Sciences and Humanities who led the research project said.
“The thing that might be most surprising is how intricate and visual many of the jokes were,” says Martha Bayless, a historian and director of folklore and public culture at University of Oregon.
She remembers catching herself chuckling in the quiet Cambridge University Library manuscript room, during her research for her PhD in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic.“I kept noticing these little humorous works tucked in between the serious medieval treatises,” she says.
There were parodies of abstruse philosophy, there were theological jokes. Some took a thorough knowledge of Latin to understand.
She also chanced upon Anglo-Saxon nicknames such as “Toad-Balls” or “Roger God-Save-the-Ladies” recorded in official documents, which never failed to crack her up.
She has found jokes and humorous illustrations scribbled in the margins of early Latin Bibles too. “People will go wild in the margins of even the most solemn manuscripts!” she says.
Rabbits hunt people, knights square off against snails, people blow trumpets out of their bottoms, hares besiege castles defended by dogs. “There are so many weird, absurdist little scenarios that they were as much fun as any picture book.”
There was a rampant bawdiness in medieval Europe that is perhaps explained by how hard the times were.
“At a time when the plague might come roaring down the road at you at any moment, there’s no time to waste! Humour is immediate enjoyment of life — they believed in seizing it,” Bayless says.
There was even a form of stand-up in this period. Between the 5th and 16th centuries, it is said that witty courtiers traded insults in formal contests before their king. Sometimes they even insulted the king. Sometimes only once, Bayless jokes.
Easy, now
Jokes about “shrewish” wives would appear to have been a constant.
Women chase their husbands with frying pans or rolling pins; look stern and angry about an unaccomplished task; complain; judge; shrivel their mate with withering scorn… in jokes going back to the 15th and 16th centuries.
What’s interesting is that the humour hinges on a shared assumption that the man should always be in a position of power; this renders the woman’s outbursts meaningless, and therefore humorous, says Joy Wiltenburg, professor emerita of history at Rowan University and author of Laughing Histories: From the Renaissance Man to the Woman of Wit (2022).
But the joke is also often aimed at the man, she adds. “He is ridiculed for failing to uphold his dominant masculine role.”
An ancient version of that awfully inaccurate saying: Nice guys finish last.
Different cultures and eras have always had their own ideas of what is funny. In ancient Rome, bald men were a popular target. In 17th-century England, it was tailors (because sewing was seen as women’s work) and men who were cheated on by their wives.
Through time, Bayless says, jokes made at the expense of the wealthy and powerful have been popular.
Sample this one, thought to be so satisfying that it was preserved on papyrus and comes to us from Ancient Egypt: “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge him to catch a fish.”
Keep it down?
How one responded to a joke could provide material for a fresh one, particularly in etiquette-heavy zones such as aristocratic France. Here, it was considered gauche to laugh out loud. “The cultured gentleman would instead use his wit to skewer others without distorting his face with something as crude as laughter,” Wiltenburg says.
Even here, though, the appeal of body humour endured. “Part of that appeal lies in the fact that we are undignified and inappropriate. These jokes are an acceptance of the fact that we are all living in these embarrassing bodies that leak and get filthy and don’t always obey our instructions or act in line with our higher instincts,” says Bayless.
The laugh itself, interestingly, comes to us via apes (Click here for more on this, in a story from the Wknd archives). Comedy is still best-enjoyed as a group. Even today, sitcoms use laugh tracks to make the TV viewer feel less lonely in their laughter.
We can cry alone, but mirth is simply elevated when shared.