The Sumerians liked jokes. They made lists of them and some are still recognizably funny, or sort of funny, today. “The dog gnawing on a bone says to his anus: ‘This is going to hurt you!’” Or “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband’s embrace.”
Sort of funny.
Sometimes lines have survived that are clearly jokes, but which we can no longer get. For example, “A dog walked into a tavern and said, ‘I can’t see a thing. I’ll open this one.’” Why that’s funny has been lost in a mist of 4,000 years. It is, nonetheless, the very earliest example of the animal-walks-into-a-bar joke. Some things never change.
Source:
Forsyth, Mark. “Sumerian Bars.” A Short History of Drunkenness. Three Rivers Press, 2017. 31-2. Print.
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