The oldest dated joke is a Sumerian fart proverb
A joke builds a short narrative toward a punchline that should not be read literally—pun, irony, or broken logic. André Jolles classed jokes among simple oral forms. One Sumerian proverb about a young wife, recorded by Old Babylonian times and possibly older, is often called the earliest identified joke.
Brevity is the usual craft: only enough scene-setting for the final reveal, unless the teller subverts the rule with a shaggy-dog anti-joke. Jokes travel anonymously in chat or onstage, and in print they were long treated as throwaway ephemera full of scatological and sexual themes. Stand-ups lean on timing and gesture as much as wording; the folk contrast says a comic says funny things while a comedian says things funny.
The Sumerian toilet gag—claiming no young wife had ever broken wind in her husband’s lap—survives in tablets from about 1900 BC and may be centuries older. Puns resist translation: Cicero’s jab about Caesar buying land cheap from Servilia, with tertia deducta playing on her daughter Tertia, shows how Latin wordplay collapses in English. The Philogelos, 265 jokes in crude Greek from the fourth or fifth century AD, is the earliest surviving joke book.
Print culture multiplied jestbooks after movable type; Poggio Bracciolini’s Facetiae appeared in 1470, and later broadsides and chapbooks used jokes as fillers across early modern Europe and North America. Conversation analysts such as Harvey Sacks map joke-telling as cooperative sequential work—preface, telling, response—often framed by Have you heard the one….
Folklorists treat the punchline as the pressure point: tension should climb to its peak in the final sentence, with nothing tacked on afterwards to release it. Riddle jokes and one-liners strip the setup even further, because the listener already grasps the situation and only the dialogue and payoff need saying. Unlike a proverb, a joke need not be repeated word for word; tellers rebuild it from memory and tune it to whoever is listening. A stock opening such as an elephant strolling into a bar acts as a performance frame, signalling to anyone fluent in the genre that what follows stands apart from ordinary talk.
Source: Joke
