10 Amazingly Ancient Jokes That Might Still Make You Laugh

Humor is a deeply subjective thing. What one person finds hilarious leaves another sitting stony-faced. There is often a humor gap between generations, with children laughing at things their parents can barely understand. So it might be surprising that some truly ancient jokes have never gone out of style.

Here are ten jokes from history that might still raise a smile, especially if bodily functions are funny to you. Seems some things never change.

Related: 10 Ancient Gods and Goddesses Who Were All about Debauchery

10 The First Bar Joke

Everyone knows the classic bar joke. “A [noun] walks into a bar and…” They run from the absurd, “Two guys walk into a bar… the third one ducks,” to the intellectual. “A neutron walks into a bar and orders a drink. When he goes to pay, the barman says, ‘Don’t worry, for you there’s no charge.’” Most bar jokes only raise a very faint smile, but that might be because they have been around for so long that we are used to them. And they are very old.

The ancient Sumerians have left us the oldest literature in the world, and among their writings preserved on clay tablets are some of the earliest recorded jokes. One of them is the first bar joke that we know of.

“A dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I cannot see a thing. I’ll open this one.’”

Hilarious right? Well, no, but that’s because no one really knows what the punchline actually means. One suggestion is that the dog is a guard dog meant to keep undesirable people out of the bar but finds he can’t see what’s going on inside so he opens the door—letting anyone in. I suppose you had to be there.^[1]

9 The First Joke Book

The ancient Greeks may have had a fondness for philosophy but they also liked a good laugh. The oldest surviving collection of jokes was written down in antiquity and called the Philogelos—The Laughter Lover. In the 265 jokes it records, there are those that make you think and those that make you chuckle.

“A pedant almost drowned whilst swimming. He made an oath that he would not go into the water again until he had first learned to swim well.”

“A man desiring to see how he looked when asleep stood with his eyes closed in front of a mirror.”

“A pedant having a jar of choice wine sealed it up, but his servant bored a hole underneath and drew off the wine. He was astonished because the wine diminished whilst the seals remained whole. A friend said, ‘Look whether it was not drawn off from below.’ ‘You stupid fellow,’ he replied, ‘it is not the bottom which is gone but the upper part.’”^[2]

8 Early Cartoons

Not all humor is verbal; it seems that humans have always loved sight gags. Roman and Greek comedies often featured performances where the actors wore enormously large phalluses as they strutted around the stage. Roman frescoes also often included characters with huge penises. Some early drawings were a bit more tame but also clearly meant to be funny.

Ostracons are pieces of stone or pottery used like bits of paper to make little notes or sketch images. Among the thousands of ostracons that have been found are so-called “satirical” ones with pictures that work like a modern cartoon.

In one from Egypt, which dates back to around 1200 BC, the artist created a sketch of a cat and mouse that reverses the animals’ usual behavior. The mouse is shown sitting on a throne while the cat fans the mouse and offers it food and drink. Since the mouse is holding the skeleton of a fish, it has clearly already eaten the cat’s dinner. Was this just a simple joke about cats and mice, or a more subversive piece of humor suggesting the rulers of Egypt should be chased out like a cat chases a mouse?^[3]

7 Saxon Rude Riddles

The English like to think they have a good sense of humor, and there are an unusual number of comic texts from their history. The Heege Manuscript from the 15th century records the bawdy tales and songs a minstrel used to entertain his hosts. It features bizarre scenes like pigs getting drunk and battles with bumblebees. Chaucer, sometimes called the father of English literature, was not above making fart and bum jokes. But to look for the first English jokes, you have to search texts written before there even was an English one.

The Anglo-Saxons enjoyed a rich literature full of heroic tales and linguistic wordplay. Above all, they seem to have enjoyed riddles, and a number of texts record some of them—some, annoyingly, without the right answer to the riddle. Some of them are a bit dirty and amusing.

“A wondrous thing hangs by a man’s thigh,
under its lord’s clothing. In front, there is a hole.
It stands stiff and hard. It has a good home.
When the servant raises his own garment
up over his knee, he wants to greet
with his dangling head that well-known hole,
of equal length, which he has often filled before.”

What’s the answer? No, not a part of a man’s anatomy. The answer is “a key.”^[4]

6 Jokes from Rome

The Romans, for all their world-conquering military prowess, also liked to have a joke. Some of their humor was relatively gentle. The poems of Horace are an enchanting read and only delicately poke fun at others, including the author himself. As Horace says, “Humour is often stronger and more effective than sharpness in cutting knotty issues.” Other authors disagreed and turned to sharpness.

Juvenal was one of the most biting satirists who has ever lived. His satires took aim at everything he thought was wrong with the Rome of his day—and pretty much everything he saw upset him. As he said, “It is difficult not to write satire.” Rome was (to hear Juvenal tell it) full of effeminate men, treacherous women, and flatterers looking to rise in society. Just a sample of his satires gives a taste of the whole.^[5]

“After all isn’t every street packed
With sad-looking perverts? How can you castigate sin, when you
Yourself are the most notorious of all the Socratic sodomite holes?
Though hairy members, and those stiff bristles all over your arms,
Promise a rough approach, your arse turns out to be smooth enough
When the smiling doctor lances away at your swollen piles.”

5 Latin Jokes

Latin did not die out as a language of humor with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Scholars continued to write in Latin and continued to come up with jokes. The first printed joke book, The Facetiae, was written by Poggio Bracciolini in the 15th century. The book contains a series of stories with funny endings—depending on your sense of humor.

In one, a fat cardinal sits down at dinner and finds himself sweating profusely from the heat. He asks for someone to fan him, but the servants have already gone to bed. So one of his secretaries offers to create a breeze for the cardinal—but says the method might be unorthodox. When the cardinal accepts the offer, the secretary, “raising his right leg, emitted from the very depths of his bowels the most sonorous fart, saying at the same time that that was how he was accustomed to make a breeze for himself.”

In another of the tales, a wife sees a ram having sex with an ewe and asks her husband how the ram knows the ewe wants it. The man jokes that as soon as the ewe farts, the ram gets to work. The wife lets out a fart, and the husband takes her to bed. The wife farts again, and the man has to perform again. When the wife farts a third time, the husband says, “I don’t care if you blow your soul out; I need to sleep.”^[6]

4 Pharaoh Mockery

The pharaohs of ancient Egypt were more than just the kings of their realm; they were considered almost gods on Earth. You might think their religious position would put them outside the scope of jokes, but papyri with jokes at the pharaohs’ expense have been found.

On the Westcar Papyrus, dating from 1600 BC, there is a political treatise that recounts the adventures of the Pharaoh Sneferu and a magician called Djadjaemankh. Sneferu comes across as bored and depressed, so Djadjaemankh has to find ways to entertain him. One of his methods is to get beautiful virgins to row on a royal lake for the pharaoh’s entertainment. When one of the women drops some jewelry into the lake, Djadjaemankh simply folds one half of the lake on top of the other and retrieves it. But how do you cheer up a god on Earth?

Djadjaemankh says, “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.”^[7]

3 Aristophanes’ Old Comedy

In ancient Athens, each year, there was a competition where the comic poets of the city put on plays in honor of the god Dionysus. The first great period of comic plays was known as “Old Comedy” and, despite fragments by other writers, we only have the works of Aristophanes to judge it by. Luckily, Aristophanes has remained funny for almost 2,500 years.

The plots of Aristophanes’ plays were often absurd in the extreme but also poked fun at the people sitting in his audience. In the plays, important figures like Socrates and Pericles are mentioned. In The Clouds, Socrates is portrayed as a charlatan whose philosophers study bizarre things like how large a flea’s feet are and how midges make their buzzing noise (it turns out they make it by farting).

Aristophanes was such a sharp comic that he was occasionally punished for mocking powerful people a little too much. Mixed in with his political humor are fart jokes, penis jokes, and lewd innuendo about the sex lives of the Athenians.^[8]

2 Extensive Gleanings from the Forest of Laughter

The Xiaolin Guangji, a Chinese book with a title that can be translated Extensive Gleanings from the Forest of Laughter, collects thousands of jokes from the Ming and Qing dynasties. They cover a variety of topics, from Confucius and poverty to gross bodily humor.

In one joke, a rich but stingy man boasts to a poor man that he has 100,000 silver coins. The poor man says that he has as much money. The rich man is incredulous. The poor man smiles and says, ‘You have money and don’t spend it, I can’t spend mine, so we are the same.’ In another, a eunuch sees a man urinating by the side of the road and decides to look closer. Delighted by what he sees in the man’s pants, the eunuch claps loudly.

Lots of the jokes poke fun at people for their stupid ideas. When a street vendor offers an infallible poison that will kill fleas, people flock to him to buy it. After they have handed over their money, they ask how they should use the poison. “Simple,” he says, “just pick up the flea and force the powder into its mouth!”^[9]

1 The Oldest Fart Joke

Fart jokes seem to be one style of humor that unites all cultures and people in all time periods. There is something about bottom burps and their noises that make everyone smile. The Japanese created scrolls called (appropriately) “He-gassen,” which show people battling each other by blasting farts at each other.

When Edward de Vere broke wind in front of Queen Elizabeth I, he is said to have fled the court for seven years. On his return, the queen is said to have taken his hand and said, “My lord, we had quite forgot the fart.” Later, when someone happened to fart in Parliament, hundreds of poems about the fart were written down and circulated to mock the political windbags.

How far back does the human love of fart jokes go? At least until 1900 BC, it turns out. A Mesopotamian tablet contains what may be the oldest fart joke ever. What is the joke? “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” The only problem is that no one really knows why it was funny. Were Sumerian wives known for farting on their husbands? Alas, we may never know whether he who dealt it, smelt it.^[10]