by the Night Writer
They didn’t exactly find a heiroglyphic of a someone pulling another person’s finger inside the tomb of King TootTut, but a link from the online Wall Street Journal describes how research has revealed that early civilizations were just as prone to recording scatological humor and to laughing at farts, sex and stupid people.
Scouring ancient texts, researchers from Wolverhampton University found the jokes laid down in delicate manuscripts and carved into stone tablets up to three thousand years old.
Dr Paul MacDonald, a comic novelist and lecturer in creative writing, said ancient civilizations laughed about much the same things as we do today.
He said jokes ancient and modern shared “a willingness to deal with taboos and a degree of rebellion.”
“Modern puns, Essex girl jokes and toilet humour can all be traced back to the very earliest jokes identified in this research,” he commented.
Lost civilisations laughed at farts, sex, and “stupid people” just as we do today, Dr McDonald said.
But they found evidence that Egyptians were laughing at much the same thing.
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The world’s oldest surviving joke “is essentially a fart gag”, he said.
The 3,000-year-old Sumerian proverb, from ancient Babylonia, reads: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”
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Dr McDonald commented: “Toilet humour goes back just about as far as we can go.”
Similarly, going about as far as you can go sounds a lot like these guys.
