Funny?
Q: What occupies the last six pages of the Lada User’s Manual?
A: The bus and train timetables.
This little chestnut used to have them rolling in the meat lines back in jolly olde Petrograd. Or take this timeless tittle from far Cathay.
Q: Why don’t airplanes run into the stars?
A: Because the stars can dodge.
An essential ingredient of humor is context. It’s hard to know why Kimye is funny if you don’t get TMZ, and tech-support gags fall flat if you’ve never been crushed by it. Unless you’ve been disappointed by Soviet industrial incompetence, or understand the nuances of Mandarin Chinese, jokes generated thereby might not seem particularly humorous. On the other hand, we’ve all driven a lemon at one time or another, and jokes about airline food are an important part of our collective social diet. Even if we don’t get the specific gag, we know where it’s coming from.
But can the same be said of humor that predates the Pacer? Jokes coined before stewardesses? Jests made in an Internet-free vacuum? If there’s a commonality to humor, a binding thread that transcends language, culture and time, to find it we’ll have to look back a-ways, to an age as foreign to Carrot Top as it is to Yakov Smirnov and TJ Jin. To find the Mother Cell of humor, we must start at the beginning.
From the ancient soil of Sumer, in what is now southern Iraq, those merry madcaps of the science world, archaeologists, pulled a 3,900-year-old clay tablet inscribed with the world’s oldest known joke.
Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.
A familiar theme, if not reassuringly so. And wags of the Fertile Crescent bequeathed to history plenty of other low-brow quips. Consider this proto-riddle left to us on a Babylonian student’s work-tablet.
Q: In your mouth and your teeth, constantly staring at you, the measuring vessel of your lord. What is it?
A: Beer.
It seems the Cradle of Civilization leaned more to Judd Apatow than Dick Cavett, and the otherwise sophisticated Egyptians weren’t much better. Ponder this gem committed to papyrus around 1,600 BC.
Q: How do you entertain a bored pharaoh?
A: You sail a boatload of women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.
It would be another thousand years before deep-thinking Plato, who may have been the first person ever to invest serious brain-time in the mechanics of comedy, dreamed up the Superiority Theory of humor which says that people will laugh at anything involving the foibles and misfortunes of somebody else. This, then, from the same penetrating minds that gave us Antigone, Democracy and the Parthenon…
Wishing to teach his donkey not to eat, the man did not offer him any food. When the donkey died of hunger, he said “I’ve had a great loss! Just when he had learned not to eat, he died!
The Superiority Theory of humor was alive and well in 250 A.D. when Roman scholars Hierokles and Philagrios took quills to parchment and came up with the earliest known joke book. Titled “Philogelos” (“The Laughter Lover”), it’s a misfortune-loving treasury of 265 foible-filled anecdotes numbered and sorted with Roman efficiency into categories like “Intellectuals”;
No. 43: When an intellectual was told by someone, “Your beard is now coming in,” he went to the rear-entrance and waited for it. Another intellectual saw this and said “I’m not surprised that people say we lack common sense. How do you know that it’s not coming in by the other gate?”
“Misogynists”;
No. 246: A misogynist stood in the marketplace and announced: “I’m putting my wife up for sale, tax-free!” When people asked him why, he said: “So the authorities will impound her.”
and “People with Bad Breath”;
No. 234: A man with bad breath asked his wife “Madame, why do you hate me?” And she said in reply “Because you love me.”
Sigmund Freud thought to out-think Plato with what he called the Relief Theory of humor. According to Freud, jokes are a kind of release valve for secret desires. Take a guess what secret desire is hinted at in this riddle from the 10th-century Codex Exoniensis, a compendium of Anglo-Saxon poetry enshrined within Exeter Cathedral.
Q: What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before?
A: A key.
But not all ancient humorists assigned profound significance to their craft. Take 12th-century Italian scholar Poggio Braciolini, author of “Facetiae” and the Middle Ages’ most popular comedy writer. “It is proper, and almost a matter of necessity commended by philosophers,” Poggio wrote, “that our mind, weighed down by a variety of cares and anxieties, should now and then enjoy relaxation from its constant labour, and be incited to cheerfulness and mirth by some humorous recreation.” Braciolini incites cheerfulness and mirth thusly:
Several persons were conversing in Florence, and each was wishing for something that would make him happy. One would have liked to be the Pope, another a king, a third something else, when a talkative child, who happened to be there, said, “I wish I were a melon.” “And for what reason?” they asked. “Because everyone would smell my bottom.” It was usual for those who want to buy a melon to apply their noses underneath.
While none of those antique rib-ticklers might strike the modern mind as knee-slapping, it’s easy to perceive the underlying comical construction of each. They all adhere, in their way, to what latter-day joke-meisters Victor Raskin of Purdue University and Texas A&M’s Salvatore Attardo pioneered as the not-at-all-funny-sounding “Script-based Semantic Theory of Verbal Humor” and later refined into the grandiose “General Theory of Verbal Humor.” As Raskin explained to the New Yorker just last year, “The idea is that every joke is based on a juxtaposition of two scripts. The punch line triggers the switch from one script to the other. It is a universal theory.”
And it appears that some contexts are universal, too. Some scripts, however, may be more universal than others.
No. 51: A doctor was talking to a patient. “Doctor,” the patient says, “Whenever I get up after a sleep, I feel dizzy for half an hour, then I’m all right.” “Then wait for half an hour before getting up,” said the doctor.
