Some of the oldest jokes in history are still in use today.It is striking that the earliest recorded joke is about toilet humour. The earliest jokes we have on record suggest that crude jokes stand the test of time. Flatulence, for example, is funny because it shows our "uncontrollable physicality".

The Oldest Jokes Are About Toilet Humor

<ul><li>Finding a universally funny joke is challenging.</li><li>Effective jokes are a "benign violation" always walking a delicate balancing act between too soft and too extreme.</li><li>The purpose of a benign violation is to elicit laughter and disgust at the same time.</li><li>Jokes in the times of all-powerful medieval monarchs were a risky business.</li><li>Many of the oldest written jokes were scribbled in the margins of ornate early Latin Bibles.</li><li>Raw intelligence is the most effective indicator of whether someone is funny.</li></ul>

Jokes Through The Centuries

Stand-up comedy in recent years has evolved at speed. Kylie Brakeman was one of the early adopters of a new kind of observational comedy that emerged at the start of the pandemic. Her to-camera Twitter videos have attracted millions of views and kicked off an era in which the day's events can be parodied within minutes. Online comedians are increasingly at the bleeding edge of satire. If something happened in the news you could jump on it right away. It's an advantage that online comedians have.

Stand Up Comedy Is Evolving

Bayless has found that many of the <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cultural-history-of-comedy-9781350000827/" dir="ltr">oldest written jokes were scribbled in the margins of ornate early Latin Bibles</a>. Even in a culture where only academic and religious elites could read and write, early Church scholars were busy entertaining each other with smutty comments.Jokes in the times of all-powerful medieval monarchs were a risky business. Bayless recounts a story where a joke fell foul of English king Richard I. "Two men had been ridiculing the king at a drunken feast – the king was furious and summoned the men. Clearly disaster was about to befall the men, but then one of them answered: 'We might have said those things, but that was nothing to what we were going to say if the wine hadn't run out!'"It was a close shave for the men, as "if they hadn't come up with such a witty reply, their fate would have been dire indeed", says Bayless.There is less risk of being dispatched by an angry monarch these days, but reading the room is still an important skill for a comedian. McGraw says that effective jokes are a "benign violation" always walking a delicate balancing act between too soft and too extreme. <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797610376073" dir="ltr">The purpose of a benign violation is to elicit laughter and disgust at the same time</a> – which perhaps explains why crude subject matter features so commonly."It explains the two ways a joke can fail," adds McGraw. "That is that it can be too benign and too boring, like a child's knock-knock joke. Or it can be too much of a violation. It highlights how delicate joke telling is because it's easier to fail than it is to succeed." So, telling jokes is serious business, and it requires a strong capacity for understanding the audience.In fact, McGraw suggests that raw intelligence is the most effective indicator for whether someone is funny (of course a comedy writer would say that – Ed.). Among our ancestors, humour indicated that someone had a strong command of their surroundings. These jokes were made in the context of low life expectancy and a hostile world. But these fundamentals still hold in the modern day in our approach to relationships, and McGraw says "it's important to recognise how enjoyable it is to spend time with someone who is funny, they have the propensity to help you better cope with the difficulties of the world".<picture><source media="(min-width:1200px)" srcset="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1600x900/p0bx1yz0.webp" type="image/webp"><source media="(min-width:1200px)" srcset="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1600x900/p0bx1yz0.jpg" type="image/jpeg"><source media="(min-width:880px)" srcset="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1280x720/p0bx1yz0.webp" type="image/webp"><source media="(min-width:880px)" srcset="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1280x720/p0bx1yz0.jpg" type="image/jpeg"><source media="(min-width:576px)" srcset="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/976x549/p0bx1yz0.webp" type="image/webp"><source media="(min-width:576px)" srcset="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/976x549/p0bx1yz0.jpg" type="image/jpeg"><source media="(min-width:224px)" srcset="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/624x351/p0bx1yz0.webp" type="image/webp"><source media="(min-width:224px)" srcset="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/624x351/p0bx1yz0.jpg" type="image/jpeg"><img title="There are two ways a joke can fail: it can be too bland or too offensive. A comedian must aim for a joke that is a &quot;benign violation&quot; (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/ Getty Images)" src="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/976x549/p0bx1yz0.jpg" alt="There are two ways a joke can fail: it can be too bland or too offensive. A comedian must aim for a joke that is a &quot;benign violation&quot; (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/ Getty Images)" width="687" height="386"></picture>There are two ways a joke can fail: it can be too bland or too offensive. A comedian must aim for a joke that is a "benign violation" (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/ Getty Images)For example, <a href="https://content.iospress.com/articles/bio-medical-materials-and-engineering/bme1130" dir="ltr">jokes help us to subvert emotional states</a>. When dealing with difficult subject matters, a funny punchline can distract us from the negative emotions.And what about the contemporary panic about "cancel culture" in comedy? For McGraw, this is not such a unique moment in history."This phenomenon has been happening ever since there has been stand-up comedy," he says. As the two jesters from Richard I's court demonstrate, comedy has always been risky, and the power has always ultimately rested with the audience."What is wrong and what is OK is determined not by the teller, but by the audience member, by the receiver, and by their mood, the context they're in, the number of drinks they've had, their culture, their identity," continues McGraw.If the power rests with the audience, the comedian has a tricky task in pleasing them. Stand-up comedian Catherine Bohart knows this pressure well. "The psychology of an audience is really interesting because [if] you seem fine, they are willing to trust you," she says. "But if you are being vulnerable, they can sniff out that anxiety and vulnerability."It is an unusual arrangement to be commanding so much attention for such a long time, and audiences demand value. Bohart is currently touring across the UK and Ireland, and she agrees with McGraw that, while there may be common themes across thousands of years of comedy, there is no single bit of stand-up material that works 100% of the time. Stand-up comedy is risky precisely because the comedian faces a fresh set of audience members to win over each time.<picture><source media="(min-width:624px)" srcset="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1024x1280/p0bx1zvt.webp" type="image/webp"><source media="(min-width:624px)" srcset="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1024x1280/p0bx1zvt.jpg" type="image/jpeg"><source media="(min-width:485px)" srcset="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/885x1280/p0bx1zvt.webp" type="image/webp"><source media="(min-width:485px)" srcset="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/885x1280/p0bx1zvt.jpg" type="image/jpeg"><source media="(min-width:320px)" srcset="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/720x900/p0bx1zvt.webp" type="image/webp"><source media="(min-width:320px)" srcset="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/720x900/p0bx1zvt.jpg" type="image/jpeg"><img title="They power in comedy rests with the audience – they decide what is funny and what is offensive (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/ Getty Images)" src="https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/720x900/p0bx1zvt.jpg" alt="They power in comedy rests with the audience – they decide what is funny and what is offensive (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/ Getty Images)" width="592" height="740"></picture>They power in comedy rests with the audience – they decide what is funny and what is offensive (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/ Getty Images)Bohart says that audience laughter is complicated. "The moment of shock can stifle laughter. Anything we're not supposed to laugh at: death, mental health, brutal self-deprecation. People can shy away from laughing out loud."Stand-up comedy in recent years has evolved at speed. Kylie Brakeman was one of the early adopters of a new kind of observational comedy that emerged at the start of the pandemic. Her to-camera Twitter videos have attracted millions of views and kicked off an era in which the day's events can be parodied within minutes."It's insane that we're living in a world where daily TV is too slow to keep up," says Brakeman. Online comedians are increasingly at the bleeding edge of satire. "If something happened in the news you could jump on it right away. It's an advantage that online comedians have. Even if you're writing for a late night show, the joke has already been made 17 times on Twitter before the show airs at night."This type of modern comedy, which dates in minutes, is a far cry from a joke scribbled in the margins of a Latin text, which needed to remain funny for the next scholar at whichever time they stumbled across it.With this accelerated production process comes a different set of risks. But with an audience of millions kept behind a screen, "bombing" online feels less catastrophic. Brakeman says, "If people like it, then they like it. And if they don't, they're really not thinking about it that much. I think it's much less of a severe thing than bombing on stage, because it's just a case of getting no likes on something."Who knows what audiences thousands of years in the future would think if they unearthed videos of contemporary comedians. Maybe they will look at the cutting-edge comedy of today and see it much like the Mesopotamian fart joke: lacking in some of the finer cultural details, but with fundamentals that stand the test of time.*Matt Kenyon is a journalist and comedy writer for 'The Skewer' on BBC Radio 4.--Join one million Future fans by liking us on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/BBCFuture/" dir="ltr">Facebook</a>, or follow us on&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/BBC_Future" dir="ltr">Twitter</a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href="https://www.instagram.com/bbcfuture_official/" dir="ltr">Instagram</a>.If you liked this story,&nbsp;<a href="http://pages.emails.bbc.com/subscribe/?ocid=fut.bbc.email.we.email-signup" dir="ltr">sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter</a>, called "The Essential List" – a handpicked selection of stories from BBC&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bbc.com/future" dir="ltr">Future</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture" dir="ltr">Culture</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bbc.com/worklife" dir="ltr">Worklife</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bbc.com/travel" dir="ltr">Travel</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.bbc.com/reel/" dir="ltr">Reel</a>&nbsp;delivered to your inbox every Friday.

We are told "the old ones are the best ones" – and some of the oldest jokes in history are still in use today. It’s worth going back a few thousand years to find out why.

Stashed ideas

Bayless has found that many of the <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cultural-history-of-comedy-9781350000827/">oldest written jokes were scribbled in the margins of ornate early Latin Bibles </a>. Even in a culture where only academic and religious elites could read and write, early Church scholars were busy entertaining each other with smutty comments.

Jokes in the times of all-powerful medieval monarchs were a risky business. Bayless recounts a story where a joke fell foul of English king Richard I. "Two men had been ridiculing the king at a drunken feast – the king was furious and summoned the men. Clearly disaster was about to befall the men, but then one of them answered: 'We might have said those things, but that was nothing to what we were going to say if the wine hadn't run out!'"

It was a close shave for the men, as "if they hadn't come up with such a witty reply, their fate would have been dire indeed", says Bayless.

There is less risk of being dispatched by an angry monarch these days, but reading the room is still an important skill for a comedian. McGraw says that effective jokes are a "benign violation" always walking a delicate balancing act between too soft and too extreme. <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797610376073">The purpose of a benign violation is to elicit laughter and disgust at the same time </a>– which perhaps explains why crude subject matter features so commonly.

"It explains the two ways a joke can fail," adds McGraw. "That is that it can be too benign and too boring, like a child's knock-knock joke. Or it can be too much of a violation. It highlights how delicate joke telling is because it's easier to fail than it is to succeed." So, telling jokes is serious business, and it requires a strong capacity for understanding the audience.

In fact, McGraw suggests that raw intelligence is the most effective indicator for whether someone is funny (of course a comedy writer would say that – Ed. ). Among our ancestors, humour indicated that someone had a strong command of their surroundings. These jokes were made in the context of low life expectancy and a hostile world. But these fundamentals still hold in the modern day in our approach to relationships, and McGraw says "it's important to recognise how enjoyable it is to spend time with someone who is funny, they have the propensity to help you better cope with the difficulties of the world".

There are two ways a joke can fail: it can be too bland or too offensive. A comedian must aim for a joke that is a "benign violation" (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/ Getty Images)

For example, <a href="https://content.iospress.com/articles/bio-medical-materials-and-engineering/bme1130">jokes help us to subvert emotional states </a>. When dealing with difficult subject matters, a funny punchline can distract us from the negative emotions.

And what about the contemporary panic about "cancel culture" in comedy? For McGraw, this is not such a unique moment in history.

"This phenomenon has been happening ever since there has been stand-up comedy," he says. As the two jesters from Richard I's court demonstrate, comedy has always been risky, and the power has always ultimately rested with the audience.

"What is wrong and what is OK is determined not by the teller, but by the audience member, by the receiver, and by their mood, the context they're in, the number of drinks they've had, their culture, their identity," continues McGraw.

If the power rests with the audience, the comedian has a tricky task in pleasing them. Stand-up comedian Catherine Bohart knows this pressure well. "The psychology of an audience is really interesting because [if] you seem fine, they are willing to trust you," she says. "But if you are being vulnerable, they can sniff out that anxiety and vulnerability."

It is an unusual arrangement to be commanding so much attention for such a long time, and audiences demand value. Bohart is currently touring across the UK and Ireland, and she agrees with McGraw that, while there may be common themes across thousands of years of comedy, there is no single bit of stand-up material that works 100% of the time. Stand-up comedy is risky precisely because the comedian faces a fresh set of audience members to win over each time.

They power in comedy rests with the audience – they decide what is funny and what is offensive (Credit: Javier Hirschfeld/ Getty Images)

Bohart says that audience laughter is complicated. "The moment of shock can stifle laughter. Anything we're not supposed to laugh at: death, mental health, brutal self-deprecation. People can shy away from laughing out loud."

Stand-up comedy in recent years has evolved at speed. Kylie Brakeman was one of the early adopters of a new kind of observational comedy that emerged at the start of the pandemic. Her to-camera Twitter videos have attracted millions of views and kicked off an era in which the day's events can be parodied within minutes.

"It's insane that we're living in a world where daily TV is too slow to keep up," says Brakeman. Online comedians are increasingly at the bleeding edge of satire. "If something happened in the news you could jump on it right away. It's an advantage that online comedians have. Even if you're writing for a late night show, the joke has already been made 17 times on Twitter before the show airs at night."

This type of modern comedy, which dates in minutes, is a far cry from a joke scribbled in the margins of a Latin text, which needed to remain funny for the next scholar at whichever time they stumbled across it.

With this accelerated production process comes a different set of risks. But with an audience of millions kept behind a screen, "bombing" online feels less catastrophic. Brakeman says, "If people like it, then they like it. And if they don't, they're really not thinking about it that much. I think it's much less of a severe thing than bombing on stage, because it's just a case of getting no likes on something."

Who knows what audiences thousands of years in the future would think if they unearthed videos of contemporary comedians. Maybe they will look at the cutting-edge comedy of today and see it much like the Mesopotamian fart joke: lacking in some of the finer cultural details, but with fundamentals that stand the test of time.

*Matt Kenyon is a journalist and comedy writer for 'The Skewer' on BBC Radio 4.

Join one million Future fans by liking us on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/BBCFuture/">Facebook </a>, or follow us on <a href="https://twitter.com/BBC_Future">Twitter </a> or <a href="https://www.instagram.com/bbcfuture_official/">Instagram </a>.

If you liked this story, <a href="http://pages.emails.bbc.com/subscribe/?ocid=fut.bbc.email.we.email-signup">sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter </a>, called "The Essential List" – a handpicked selection of stories from BBC <a href="https://www.bbc.com/future">Future </a>, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture">Culture </a>, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/worklife">Worklife </a>, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/travel">Travel </a> and <a href="https://www.bbc.com/reel/">Reel </a> delivered to your inbox every Friday.

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

The jokes that have made people laugh for thousands of years

The Oldest Jokes Are About Toilet Humor

Jokes Through The Centuries

Stand Up Comedy Is Evolving

IDEAS ABOUT

MORE LIKE THIS

Sarcasm, Self-Deprecation, and Inside Jokes: A User’s Guide to Humor at Work

How It Feels To Write A Joke And Tell It On Stage

Why Comedians Are Actually Master Psychologists

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

The jokes that have made people laugh for thousands of years

The Oldest Jokes Are About Toilet Humor

Jokes Through The Centuries

Stand Up Comedy Is Evolving

IDEAS ABOUT

MORE LIKE THIS

Sarcasm, Self-Deprecation, and Inside Jokes: A User’s Guide to Humor at Work

How It Feels To Write A Joke And Tell It On Stage

Why Comedians Are Actually Master Psychologists

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career