3/18/2023 0 Comments See you in the funny pages meaning![]() ![]() And it serves as a key mile marker in the evolution of humans and, specifically, our humor.Īmory: But there’s one little problem, a mystery that has been bugging scholars for decades since the joke was unearthed. ![]() It’s a bar joke history’s first recorded “X walks into a bar.” The joke is 4,000 years old - from the infancy of written language. What do you- (Laughs.)īen: This joke we were looking for is not a blonde joke. I wouldn’t know.Īmory: It’s just how I am. We were on our way to Philadelphia in search of this one particular joke - one that we were told was sitting in a dark storage cabinet, scrawled on an ancient block of clay.Īmory: I’m not really blonde, but I know a blonde joke.Īmory: What do you call a blonde- (Laughs.)īen: Apparently, this joke is hilarious. Sort of.īen: You still haven’t finished your joke.Īmory: I know, I’m trying to think of any jokes I actually know, but like…Īmory: In fairness, I was driving. Let’s make some jokes.Īmory: Oh god, I didn’t have anything to say after that.īen: A few weeks ago, Amory and I hopped in my car and headed south from Boston. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.īen Brock Johnson: Let’s do the jokes. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. This content was originally created for audio. Everyone who makes a monthly donation will get access to exclusive bonus content. If you want that too, we would deeply appreciate your contribution to our work in any amount. We love making Endless Thread, and we want to be able to keep making it far into the future. The two tablets, CBS 14104 and UM 29-15-565, at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, also known as the Penn Museum.Sumerian Animal Proverbs and Fables: ‘Collection Five’ ( Journal of Cuneiform Studies).This bar joke from ancient Sumer has been making rounds (Reddit).Depths of Wikipedia’s tweet about ‘one of the earliest bar jokes’ (Twitter).Mixer and sound designer: Emily Jankowski Show producers: Megan Cattel, Dean Russell, Nora Saks, Grace Tatter, Kristin Torres, and Quincy Walters Credits:Ĭo-hosts: Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson In this episode, the first of two parts, Endless Thread journeys back in time, attempting to deconstruct the origins of humor and explain an unexplainable joke from the forgotten tablets of the past. The temptation to decode the joke from a bygone era was palpable - partly because understanding it could reveal something unique about early human civilization. Another guessed that the line was akin to a New Yorker cartoon offering a “vignette of life” in Sumer, the earliest civilization in southern Mesopotamia. “It was probably some type of pun based on word pronunciation,” wrote one person. Nor did the thousands of Twitter and Reddit users who responded to a viral post about the joke in March. Roughly translated from the dead language of Sumerian, the joke reads: “A dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I cannot see a thing. The tablet is 4,000 years old, nearly from the dawn of writing. Scrawled in tiny, wedge-shaped characters was what is arguably the world’s first documented bar joke. In the late 1800s, archeologists in Iraq uncovered an ancient clay tablet with a peculiar yet familiar line of text. The story appears in podcast feeds under the title, " Jokes, Part I: Sumer Funny, Sumer Not." Listen to part two here. This is the first episode of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. (Courtesy of the Penn Museum/Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative) An ancient tablet with a Sumerian bar joke. ![]()
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