Were The First Jokes Ever Funny?
The answer to this question that the article titles today would be mostly NO. In other words, the first jokes in history were not very funny, or not very funny. .. if you look at it from the current perspective.
So, if we look at the sense of humor that human beings had more than 3000 years ago and today, we will see that, like so many other things, it has evolved.
Be that as it may, it all depends on the particular society we are looking at. That is, the humor was not exactly the same among the Sumerians as it was among the Greeks, Egyptians, or Romans.
However, we do observe among the first jokes in history, comparing them with the current ones, an important conjunctural factor. In other words, as it happens today, each society is the one that sets the course of the sense of humor, something that has not evolved much for thousands of years.
The first jokes in history
A group of academics from the University of Wolverhampton, in Great Britain, was commissioned to carry out a study on the oldest jokes in history that have survived multiple current events.
As we have commented, professors such as Paul McDonald, a specialist from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, showed that the sense of humor has evolved over the years, taking old formats such as questions and answers in the formulation of jokes. Others, however, were witty proverbs and riddles.
However, despite the evolution of jokes in these thousands of years, they all had something in common that they still retain today, their willingness to address taboos and prohibited topics in society.
According to McDonald, the jokes of yesteryear, like the current ones, already had a certain “rebellious content” -using exits they were not socially approved-, using formulas such as puns. For this reason, eschatological humor, for example, was also present in many jokes or jokes.
Some of the first jokes in history
The best way to explain what the first jokes in history were like is to know them. To do this, we are going to see some of those extracted by the aforementioned study so that each reader can judge whether it is funny or not and evaluate how the issue it deals with has evolved to this day from a personal and personal point of view.
The wife before the husband
This joke is the oldest known, and is dated between 1900 and 1600 BC, in times of Sumerian culture. We observe a predominant component of machismo and eschatology in its content.
Criticism of power
Extracted from the so-called Westcar Papyrus, in this Egyptian document kept since 1866 in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin and dated in 1600 BC, we observe that human passions, especially of men towards women, are a constant in the humor of all women. epochs.
Jokes with humor and moral
Dating back to 1200 BC in Mesopotamia, this joke is more of a cautionary tale of sorts, showing that humor and satire sometimes focused on little stories and proverbs rather than jokes .
If you have been amused by any of these, the first three known jokes in history, perhaps you may have the feeling that our way of making humor has not evolved, although in many cases the means with which it is made have evolved. . For example, the famous memes.
