Thursday, July 31, 2008

World's Oldest Joke

After years of gruelling research and backbreaking labor, researchers have finally uncovered the world's oldest joke, and surprisingly enough it doesn't involve a man walking into a bar. 1900 BC was a good year for a lot of reasons. Or so I imagine, I don't really know any of the reasons. What I do know is that it was the year comedy was born. It is a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq and goes: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Maybe something was lost in translation, but somehow the humorous part of that joke was lost on me. Perhaps that's what took researchers so long - I imagine there were heated debates about whether or not that was actually a joke or not. Yes, comedy has come a long way since then, but I have still been unable to determine when high brow humor was invented. Not until much later I imagine. But this reminds me of an age old question I've struggled with for a long time. If you had the option of hearing a joke so funny that you would die of laughter, would you want to hear it? The more I think about it, the more I think I would want to hear it because it would be better to die of laughter than to die of curiosity.

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