Dirty Jokes of the Ancients Unearthed

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.)