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 mystery of what makes a joke funny - but only to some people ( The Conversation).Play vocalisations and human laughter: a comparative review ( Bioacoustics).Evolution, Structure, and Functions of Human Laughter ( The Handbook of Communication Science and Biology).Depths of Wikipedia’s tweet about “one of the earliest bar jokes” (Twitter).The first part of Endless Thread’s two-part series, “Jokes, Part I: Sumer Funny, Sumer Not”.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 second of two parts, Endless Thread continues its journey attempting to deconstruct the beginnings of humor and explain an unexplainable joke from the forgotten tablets of the past. Last year, two scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggested that laughter, humor’s sibling, may have begun emerging before humans 100 million years ago. The answers to both questions are complicated and still being sorted out by historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and neuroscientists. They also raise questions about when - and how - humor first emerged. I’ll open this one.’” Hilarious, right?Īs cryptic as some of these jokes can be, they offer clues into humor’s role in human civilizations. For instance, the first known bar joke reads: “A dog walked into a tavern and said, ‘I can’t see a thing. Written in Sumerian on clay tablets, these ancient jokes are often so rooted in a forgotten culture that their meaning has been lost. Roughly 4,000 years ago, scribes in southern Mesopotamia copied the first documented jokes in history. The story appears in podcast feeds under the title, “ Jokes, Part II: Stand Up.” Listen to part one first.
#FUNNY CHIMPANZEE SERIES#
This is the second episode of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. I’ll open this one.’” (Courtesy of the Penn Museum/Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative) In English, it translates as, “A dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I cannot see a thing. An ancient tablet with a Sumerian bar joke.
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