A provincial man has come to Rome, and walking on the streets was drawing everyone's attention, as he was a real double of the emperor Augustus. The emperor, having brought him to the palace, looks at him and then asks: "Tell me, young man, did your mother come to Rome anytime?" The reply was: "She never did. But my father frequently was here."
I don't think it would be funnier. It's trying to tell two jokes at the same time, which dulls both of them. One is a slightly complex perspective shift; the other is a dirty pun.
If I were writing that joke, I'd avoid the word "came" entirely for precisely that reason. If I were performing it in a show and had to stick to the script, I'd shade the sentence in a way that took the emphasis off the word. (The key word in the gag is "father".)
That's just my opinion, of course. You tell your jokes any way you like. I'm just speaking from my experience as a Shakespeare actor, where a lot of my effort is finding ways to help guide an audience through a text that is well-crafted but intricate, and the real meaning is sometimes obscured.
Sadly it wouldn't work in the German translation. As "came here frequently" with would be grammatically correct (in German) as "came to here frequently".
"Hier gekommen" (came here) and "hier her gekommen" (came to here) differ. One would need to translate it more freely and that would probably loose the raunchyness.
Würde nicht funktionieren, weil es die zweite Bedeutung von "ist oft hierher gekommen" nicht beinhaltet. Zumindest nicht, wenn man es grammatikalisch korrekt haben wollen würde.
Translation:
Wouldn't work because it doesn't include the second meaning of "has come here many times". At least not if you wanted it to be grammatically correct.
Can you elaborate? I’m afraid my Greek is just about at the level of “Ενα τσαι, παρακαλώ” followed by the Athenian responding in English to correct my pronunciation.
(Disclaimers: crude content ahead; also, explaining a joke makes it unfunny.)
Ancient Greece is sometimes associated with pederasty [0], where adult men have sex with younger (teen-aged) boys.
GP wrote:
> I don't think that would work in Greek.
IIUC, GP's point was that commenting the word "came" is ambiguous in English, but not in the joke's original language.
My pun was that there are two ways to interpret "that wouldn't work in Greek". The first being what GP meant. The second being that if a Greek man were to ejaculate when in Rome, it "wouldn't work" to father anyone, because it would be anal sex, and therefore unlikely to impregnate their partner.
After a little more reading, I get the impression that while pedastry may have been common for ancient Greek philosophers, it may have taken a form other than anal sex.
IIUC, in their society, anal sex (with anyone, including women) was considered vulgar. At least according to their surviving writings; no idea about common practice.
Disclaimer: Not my area of expertise. I'm just going from a few additional resources I found on the topic.
Ah that makes sense, I was coming at this from the wrong direction and assumed it was supposed to be an assonance rather than a reference to one of the oldest contraceptive :)
Oh naturally. I tried to stuff in as many puns as possible, so I when I looked up synonyms and learned a new word that looked like a perfect fit, I just had to experiment. :)
The emperor makes a joke at the cost of the peasant's mother - that she was in Rome at some point and was impregnated by the emperor's father. The peasant's clever answer implies that his own (peasant) father had sex with the emperor's mother and that the emperor is therefore the son of a peasant.
I think the emperors joke was that he himself impregnated the peasants mother not his father. because if it was his father, that would make the peasant his brother and would make the matter serious with regards to the claim for the trone. My understanding is at that time peasants would marry and have children at age 13 and emperors having sex with thousands of women was not morally inadequate
> that would make the peasant his brother and would make the matter serious with regards to the claim for the trone.
This is not how Roman succession worked. Especially at this time. This is a joke about the first Emperor Augusts. His biological father, whilst being pretty important politically, was not the reason he was able to turn himself into Emperor. A very basic explanation was that he got much of his power base from Julius Ceaser, who had adopted him, when he died.
So his biological father having any other children (which he in fact did have, an elder sister, who's own Son entered politics) would not matter at all. As the relationship with his maternal Uncle was where he drew his power.
This is all simplified, and I am no expert. But it is all much more complicated, and interesting (and always has been) than some simple rule of eldest son gets the throne.
> Soleo in Augusto magis mirari quos pertulit iocos quam ipse quos protulit, qui maior est patientiae quam facundiae laus, maxime cum aequanimiter aliqua etiam iocis mordaciora pertulerit. Cuiusdam provincialis iocus asper innotuit. Intraverat Romam simillimus Caesari et in se omnium ora converterat. Augustus perduci ad se hominem iussit, visumque hoc modo interrogavit: Dic mihi, adolescens, fuit aliquando mater tua Romae? Negavit ille, nec contentus adiecit: Sed pater meus saepe.
In August I am always more surprised at those jokes he bore than those he himself uttered, who has greater praise for patience than for eloquence, especially when he bore with equanimity even some of the more biting jokes. A rough joke of a provincial became known. He had entered Rome, most like Caesar, and had turned the mouths of all on him. Augustus ordered the man to be brought to him, and it seemed as if he asked in this manner: Tell me, young man, was your mother at any time in Rome? He denied it, nor was content with it, but added, "But my father often."
Google latin translate was awful like two years ago, but has gotten ridiculously good (compared to what one would except of a mostly dead language). I haven't learned out by virtue of what effort, but someone clearly has put good work into getting it working. I assume it involves digitisation of medieval latin manuscripts (of which there are many). I wonder how it does/could do at Sanskrit, where the surviving corpus is truly immense.
> that she was in Rome at some point and was impregnated by the emperor's father.
I guess it depends on the age difference between the man and the emperor but I assumed the emperor was referring to himself and the joke was about the emperor's wife or partner.
And technically his family, the gens Octavia, was a plebeian family, albeit his branch was rather wealthy by the time of his birth.
Speaking of his mother Atia though, she was the niece of the Gaius Julius Caesar, himself from a patrician family.
The formal distinction between the family orders waned in significance over the centuries preceding the fact. That said, people always find new ways to feel superior to other people so it's not like there were no class distinctions, but the term plebeian was quite more complicated and nuanced than our modern re-interpretation of the word.
The question implies that his Mother may have had sex with the father of Augustus.
The answer suggests that it was his Father that had sex with the mother of Augustus.
It's funny because there's a lot more tension associated with the current Emperor having been fathered by the "wrong" person than, under the original assumption, that some rube from the country was fathered by the Emperor's father.
The joke as presented here doesn’t work at all due to the emperor addressing him as “young man,” which makes it impossible to avoid the interpretation that the emperor is concerned that he himself could be the father of the young man.
I cannot figure out how this one is funny, or even a joke:
> An intellectual got a slave pregnant. At the birth, his father suggested that the child be killed. The intellectual replied: "First murder your own children and then tell me to kill mine!"
The rest are fairly amusing, or I can at least appreciate what the joke is, but this one I have nothing. I guess it must be something about the intellectual being among the father's children, but that doesn't really seem to add anything?
(thanks for the list by the way, really interesting)
It's funny because it's a mindless application of a standard reply to someone asking one to do something difficult: ``first do it yourself, then ask others to do it.'' The intellectual, the stereotypically absent-minded ``scholastic'', hasn't considered that in this particular case he is asking to be killed. And I suppose it's a bonus that he can't possibly do anything when he's dead.
A father advised a pedant who had a child born to him of a slave woman to do away with the child. He replied "First bury your own children before you advise me to do away with mine."
You could probabaly make it a little more sarcastic: "Why don't you bury..." I assume the pedant is an adult, and cannot be killed lawfully, so burial is way off in the future. And once the pedant is buried, he cannot kill his own child.
It rings a little like a more vulgar versions of the saying of Jesus, "remove the plank from your own eye..."
Two men were walking along a road talking of this and that. "What do you think," says one. "Which is more fun, defecating or having sex?"
The guy says, "Let's ask that prostitute, she's done one as often as the other."
Is it me or is that punchline not even crass? The wording the article uses to allude to it is equally crass, as far as I'm concerned (so what was the point of not including it?).
Agreed, I don't know what 'it involves asking a sex worker' spares us over that. Nor why we want to be spared in an article on 'jokes that have made people laugh for thousands of years' even if it were worse!
Man, this article starts off omitting the punchline to an ancient Roman joke, that was reprinted in 1983, because it's not PC enough for 2022? What the fuck is wrong with people now? Did Lenny Bruce die for nothing?
Those books weren't PC enough for 1983, either. They were testing the limits of acceptability at the time. But free speech is important - people have the right to publish (mostly) whatever they please. Just like this author has the right to choose not to publish the actual joke.
As someone who actually saw that book back in the ‘80’s. Truly tasteless jokes vol. 3 != bbc.com. You could definitely print those jokes today, but, as in 1983, I wouldn’t expect them in a major worldwide media outlet’s article. I’d expect to find them in a little paperback not kept in the front row of a bookshelf.
Well, I'm also a fan of testing boundaries. For me comedy can serve as a safe space in throwing wild and outrageous shit around without actually offending someone.
A rhetorical splatter fest.
Over the years I found myself to be in the (vocal) minority. And the taste has indeed shifted, this kind of shameless boundary testing has slipped into the now revolting underground.
The article also goes into this:
>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."
In our current times (in western society (vocal middle class)) free speech isn't actually valued as much as say 50 years ago. Since the beginning of multiple apparent crises (massive wealth inequality, Trump, Covid, Ukraine ...) freedom of expression gets (carefully) weight against other things which are perceived as more important.
Historically (i.e. in practice) once "lines" get drawn this fine thread evolves into an ideological battlefield.
To appreciate free speech in its fullest requires the leisure of meta-reasoning, unfortunately once insights are established they also suffer from a decay rate (proportional to the magnitude of disruptions into the cohesive fabric of societies) - if not activley reinforced - and then have to be relearned (the hard way) after the turbulent times of societal changes subside.
Because "fake news" is put in new convincing and startling clothes when narratives taken for granted crumble, to cancel something is then just burying it mindlessly, it doesn't at all address the underlying issues.
As I'm reading "The Sleepwalkers" (1932) by Hermann Broch anew this isn't something peculiar to our times as the book covers three time periods (1888, 1903, 1918) in then Europe/Germany elegantly intertwining the recurring motive of sleepwalking into deeply uncertain and unsettling times. Lucidity is few and and far between and mostly if at all acknowledged after the fact (which is a carefully constructed cue to the observant reader of 1932).
This may be the finest meta-analysis of this phenomenon I've read to date. Thank you.
In particular:
>> once insights are established they also suffer from a decay rate (proportional to the magnitude of disruptions into the cohesive fabric of societies) - if not activley reinforced - and then have to be relearned (the hard way) after the turbulent times of societal changes subside.
I'm intrigued - although not completely sold - by this idea that rather than a pendulum swinging too far one way and too far the other, we're actually regressing and forgetting hard-won liberties (and the skills most people need to reason with why those liberties are necessary). If that's so, it's more like we're entering a mini (or who knows, not so mini) dark age, right?
A good collection of ancient jokes is the Philogelos (written in 4th century Greece). Here are a couple of gems:
#45. An intellectual during the night ravished his grandmother and for this got a beating from his father. He complained: “You’ve been mounting my mother for a long time, without suffering any consequences from me. And now you’re mad that you found me screwing your mother for the first time ever!”
#69. An intellectual checked in on the parents of a dead classmate. The father was wailing: “O son, you have left me a cripple!” The mother was crying: “O son, you have taken the light from my eyes!” Later, the intellectual suggested to his friends: “If he were guilty of all that, he should have been cremated while still alive.”
#73. The same intellectual said that the tomb of Scribonia was handsome and lavish, but that it had been built on an unhealthy site.
#234. A man with bad breath asked his wife: “Madame, why do you hate me?” And she said in reply: “Because you love me.”
#45 is a classic French song! Incredible to see that it's 2000+ years old!
Ma mère m'a donné cent sous pour m'acheter des bretelles
J'ai gardé mes cent sous pour aller au bordel
Chemin faisant, j'ai rencontré grand-mère
Où vas-tu mon enfant, je m'en vais au bordel
Garde donc tes cent sous, je ferai bien l'affaire
J'ai gardé mes cent sous et j'ai baisé grand-mère
Chemin rentrant j'ai rencontré mon père
D'où viens-tu mon enfant, je viens de baiser grand-mère
Enfant de salaud, tu viens de baiser ma mère
Salaud toi-même, t'as bien baisé la mienne
losely translated:
My mother gave me a fiver to buy suspenders
I saved the money to go to the whorehouse instead
Along the way, I met Grandma
Where are you going she said; I said I'm going to the whorehouse
Keep your money, I'll do it for free
I kept the money and fucked grandma
On the way home I met my father
What's up said my father; I just fucked grandma, said I
Son of a bitch! you fucked my mother
SOB yourself, you fucked mine
Yes, sous were an old monetary unit; 100 sous amounted to 5 francs; see https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/cent_sous I translate by fiver because of this, but 5 francs 150 years ago were a lot more money than $5 today. Then the word sous evolved to be synonymous with money, but in the song it doesn't mean "money" generally, it means a specific amount of money.
Whorehouse sounds more idiomatic to me than "brothel", especially in a popular song like this one; brothel to me is a more refined/scholarly word maybe? But I may be wrong, I'm not a native English speaker.
What do they mean by "an intellectual" in this context? Seems to be used in the jokes where they say something witty as a punchline, but it feels like mentioning it explicitly doesn't add anything? Or am I missing some nuance?
On re-read, it seems that it might be even ironic - a supposed intellectual saying something dumb?
Can you do a "french inhale" / smoke like a waterfall? Push out the volume of air in your mouth slowly while inhaling through your nose.[0] I've found this pretty effective to check my own breath.
For max discernability: Breathe some fresh outside air to clear your nose, go to a non windy area and do a french inhale of your own breath (sans cigarette smoke of course).
Nevertheless... Asking my wife "do i smell from my mouthhole" works best.
What a strange article relative to its title. It provides one complete example of a joke, and then admits that no one would actually find it funny these days. It seems to be more about the fact that scatalogical humor as a category has been considered funny for thousands of years.
I wonder if there are real examples of jokes that have remained funny for thousands of years. There are ancient comedic writings like the Greek comedies, but from the little I've read of those the humor doesn't really come across either, at least in modern English, though it's also clearly heavily scatalogical.
Typical of the news, we have an article about a topic that omits the source material. Everyone who clicked that link wanted to read or listen to those old jokes and that’s the one thing the article omits
You made me laugh more than any joke in the article. The way of the world: when you want a thoughtful paragraph you get a list, when a list would be best you get something else.
I remember having to memorize the prologue to The Canterbury Tales in high school and it seeming dreadfully boring. A couple years ago for some reason I decided to read the rest of the text. I was shocked with the hilarious lewdness and also just the generally familiar description of the human condition written so long ago.
One of the funnier ones is the Millers Tale (from Wikipedia; spoilers!):
That same night, Absolon comes to the house and begs Alisoun to kiss him. At first she refuses, but Absolon persists, so she offers him one quick kiss. Instead of presenting her lips to Absolon, though, she sticks her backside out the bedroom's "shot-window" (privy vent), and Absolon kisses her "ers" (arse) in the dark. Angry at being fooled, Absolon gets a red-hot coulter from the blacksmith, with which he intends to burn Alisoun in revenge. He returns with it to the window and knocks again, promising Alisoun a gold ring in exchange for a kiss. This time, Nicholas, having gotten up to relieve himself anyway, sticks his buttocks out to get in on the joke and farts thunderously in Absolon's face. Absolon thrusts the coulter "amidst the ers" of Nicholas who cries out for "Water!" to assuage the pain.
The fact that someone took the time to write it in such structured rhyming poetry just blows my mind.
This idea was present in Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series, where all human who ever lived are brought back together. There's a scene that struck me where characters from different eras such as the paleolithic, middle-ages and the 19th century share some jokes and discover they all know the same ones.
The idea that such jokes are a universal constant of the human experience through millenia is somewhat recomforting I think.
One of the ones from the old horse cavalry days: Two privates fresh on the plains from New York are digging a hole to bury a large animal and are arguing what the animal is. One says it is a horse, and the other maintains it's a mule. The camp doctor comes up, and sets them both straight -- "It's an ass, fellas". Later the chaplain walks up, and asks the two privates what they're doing. "We're digging an ass hole."
Remember that there is a bias as this has been written by people knowing how to write. So it might not have captured the funniest jokes. P.s.: People who start a joke and don't finish it are the worst
Of course, nobody worried about cancel culture is worried about their audience not finding the jokes funny. The problem is some totally unrelated audience deciding that they must not be told.
Used to be someone thought you were funny, they could just throw you a tip. Now you need to worry if Paypal and Patreon think you're acceptable as well. It's like the internet is the king's court, or at least some duke's or other, and his ministers would like you to consider the message your standup is sending to the people.
My wife fucked a prick on my bed and this has been going on for 2 years now and am just getting to find out with the help of spyexpert0@gmail.com after a phone hack carried out on my wife phone.
Those who visit the link expecting jokes: you can read them in the comments on this page. The BBC page linked to has only one full joke. The following one.
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!'
Martial was a famous poet who wrote books of epigrams. He, while less prolific than Shakespeare, similarly invented a lot of common insults.
(For those who don't know, I'll save you a google: epigrams were short poems that were lighthearted and often made fun of people using dry classical humor.)
Why would an article in European media __not__ be focusing on European humour? Mind you, it doesn't ignore humour from the rest of the world and even starts off with several paragraphs about the oldest written joke in the world being from the Middle East.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468098
A favorite: