![]() 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 first of two parts, Endless Thread journeys back in time, attempting to deconstruct the origins of humor and explain an unexplainable joke from the forgotten tablets of the past. The temptation to decode the joke from a bygone era was palpable - partly because understanding it could reveal something unique about early human civilization. Another guessed that the line was akin to a New Yorker cartoon offering a “vignette of life” in Sumer, the earliest civilization in southern Mesopotamia. “It was probably some type of pun based on word pronunciation,” wrote one person. Nor did the thousands of Twitter and Reddit users who responded to a viral post about the joke in March. Roughly translated from the dead language of Sumerian, the joke reads: “A dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I cannot see a thing. The tablet is 4,000 years old, nearly from the dawn of writing. Scrawled in tiny, wedge-shaped characters was what is arguably the world’s first documented bar joke. In the late 1800s, archeologists in Iraq uncovered an ancient clay tablet with a peculiar yet familiar line of text. The story appears in podcast feeds under the title, " Jokes, Part I: Sumer Funny, Sumer Not." Listen to part two here. This is the first episode of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. (Courtesy of the Penn Museum/Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative) Facebook Email An ancient tablet with a Sumerian bar joke.
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