Dirty Jokes of the Ancients Unearthed

Academics discover 3,000-year-old Sumerian fart joke
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 1, 2008 8:57 AM CDT
Dirty Jokes of the Ancients Unearthed
"Man is even more eager to copulate than a donkey," reads an Egyptian hieroglyphic from thousands of years ago."His purse is what restrains him."    ((c) Orin Optiglot)

Academics studying ancient texts have discovered bawdy jokes that wouldn't be out of place in a Farrelly brothers movie, the Daily Telegraph reports. "What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before?" asks a thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon manuscript. "Answer: A key.”

Researchers combing the texts of lost civilizations for humor say that the ancients laughed at much the same things people do today. The oldest surviving joke is a fart gag found on 3,000-year-old stone tablets from Babylonia: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." (More joke stories.)

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