"Is that the best you can come up with Jerry? What will people think of it in 4,000 years? You sure you want to write it down? What about the thing you did about Babum's small hands? That was funny. People will understand that one in the future."

Sure. Its observational humor but it counts.

If it's lost in translation, the joke is about how absurd the denial can get. "Nope...never happened!"

Sumerian Seinfeld.

Joke technology sure has improved in 4000 years and with a vastly larger population with more leisure time!

Well, it's the oldest writing than can (with some fantasy) be interpreted as a joke. It's not the best one ever told in human history, which I would consider more interesting, but also harder to find.

I'd also guess, depending on the measure, the best joke is yet to come.

> It's not the best one ever told in human history, which I would consider more interesting, but also harder to find.

well the funniest religious joke is from Emo Phillips https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2005/sep/29/comedy.religio...

Boffins have done research on this a bunch of times[1][2][3].

Average length of best jokes is 103 (exactly) words by the way, as explained by Richard Wiseman to Sean Moncrieff at the 7m45s mark of this Newstalk radio-show segment[4].

Anyway … the scientifically proven funniest joke in the world is:

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He's not breathing and his eyes are glazed, so his friend calls 911. "My friend is dead! What should I do?" The operator replies, "Calm down, sir. I can help. First make sure that he's dead." There's a silence, then a loud bang. Back on the phone, the guy says, "Ok, now what?"

===

[1] “The Complexity of Jokes Is Limited by Cognitive Constraints on Mentalizing” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-015-9251-6

[2] “In 2001, I teamed up with the British Science Association to carry out ‘LaughLab’ – the scientific search for the world’s funniest joke.” https://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/research/laughlab/

[3] “It's not just the way you tell 'em: researchers find the official 50 funniest jokes of all time” https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1322475/Researchers...

[4] “The Funniest Joke Ever” https://www.newstalk.com/joke

> ...funniest joke in the world...

Where "world" is USA, Mexico and Canada.

Remember that jokes often struggle to survive translation from one modern language to another, let alone ancient Sumerian to modern English. There is, of course, an XKCD about the additional effect (https://xkcd.com/794/) when you're dealing with a completely different cultural background. It's even possible that joke technology has simply improved in the last couple of millennia; I can't remember where I read it, but I do remember reading a fairly compelling case that the art of fiction-writing has got noticeably better over the last 500 years or so.

>I do remember reading a fairly compelling case that the art of fiction-writing has got noticeably better over the last 500 years or so.

I've thought about this a bit since I've been trying to break into fiction writing. The thing I noticed, imagine how incredibly painful it was to edit your first draft back in the day. In comparison, these days we have month long contests (for fun) to write 50,000 word novels. Even though these are typically terrible, there are some that do get published and people enjoy. These stories are edited heavily. Not just grammar or spelling. Scenes are re-written. Added. Removed. Paragraphs moved. Erased. Added. Find/Replace to change a name. Etc. It's barely an inconvenience to do this on the computer. That's not easily the case with handwritten or typewritten pages. You end up re-typing it all out to see the next draft, just to notice how you need to butcher more of it and do it all over again. Page reformatting by itself is a God send.

I think modern writers are able to revise their work more often and easily in far, far less time. Just one example, I type about 3-5 times faster than handwriting. That iteration process builds up more skill, thus, better writers. Old school writers, especially pre-typewriter, probably went, "First draft is the only draft" more often than we think (minus minor corrections of course). I think the typewriter allowed the feasibility of multiple drafts without losing your damn mind, but the word processor makes it almost normal practice for many pro-writers to have 10+ drafts. Some even do full rewrites for their second or even third draft NORMALLY.

At that, the amount of professional stories someone would hear or read was minimal too. Most things were new to people even if you weren't original. These days, everyone has a huge backlog of stories they've read/heard over the years. Probably one year of someone's entertainment consumption was a lifetime over 100 years ago. I read somewhere that the average well-educated person (not scholar) in the 1700-1800s read in a month what average folks today (not even well educated) read/hear in about a day. Another example, if you want to make a comedy show, you have to see if Simpsons, Futurama, South Park or Family Guy already did the same gag because people will go, "You're unoriginal". Even South Park had an episode that Simpsons "already did it", and that was a decade ago. The bar is just super high now because of both storytelling skillsets and expectations from audiences.

Just an observation from an idiot.

>I type about 3-5 times faster than handwriting.

... but can you think at what you are typing 3-5 times faster?

Handwriting is slower than typing but the speed at which you can come up with ideas and expand them in a form suitable to be written should be more or less the same, as a matter of fact having a bottleneck at the final output allows more time for the creative part or just for thinking about which words to use, how to construct the sentence, etc.

I guess it all depends, but - only as a parallel, unrelated example - I didn't mind too much the (good ol') times when the computers were so poorly performing that you had to turn calculation off on spreadsheets (and had to hit F9 from time to time), it somehow gave me the time to get an overall look at what I had just written/changed.

>... but can you think at what you are typing 3-5 times faster？

Do you ever find yourself slowly sounding out the words as you handwrite them?

>That iteration process builds up more skill, thus, better writers.

this would explain the commonly accepted theory that writers from generations before the personal computer were all crap and cannot match up to the present generation.

Depends on the kind of joke. Stuff that's a reference to a pretty universal life experience tends to survive pretty well. Stuff based on double meanings or phonetics generally fares poorly.

> has got noticeably better over the last 500 years or so

If you're writing a book longhand, the motivation to not improve it would loom very large.

Knock knock

One I alway used to get the kids with..."I heard a great knock knock joke ok...you start." It only works a couple times, but the slow realization they're stuck and what's happened is always entertaining.

Who's there

Tu

Tu who?

Tutankhamen!

This one was all the rage in the New Kingdom.