Would be slightly funnier if you add English double entendre: “But my father came here frequently.”

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.

This just made my day. Thanks kind stranger.

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.

"But my father often spent the night in Rome."

"But my father often sampled Rome's pleasures."

Or something alike.

“Aber mein Vater kam hier oft”?

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.

I don't think that would work in Greek.

Didn’t Lysistrata have the exact same joke?

I don't know; do you have a reference; what's the Greek verb?

Now THAT is one heck of a double entendre!

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece

Correction to my posts above:

(Warning: NSFW content)

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 :)

> assonance

I very much hope you chose that word intentionally.

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. :)

I'm just so happy now.

I took the joke to imply that they both had the same fathers (to different mothers)

I don't get it :/ Can someone explain?

EDIT: Apparently the emperor is asking to see if they share parents, and not to see whether the emperor is his father, as I originally thought.

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.

Augustus was famous for pushing for better morals, he even banished her daughter for that.

His daughter, sorry

Indeed, this makes even more sense than my explanation!

Thanks for the explanation. This is one of the few times when the explanation makes the joke much funnier.

Looks like making a joke at the expense of people-in-power has always been funny.

True. In general, jokes are almost always at the expense of someone. Also from the article:

> here are two ways a joke can fail: it can be too bland or too offensive.

In comedy shows, I find most jokes that get laughs/laugh-tracks are just offensive to someone.

It's all fun and games until someone gets slapped ;)

In what sort of barbaric culture would somebody get slapped because of telling a joke?

That's a good one. Feigning ignorance while simultaneously putting salt in the cut.

One where murder on live TV was looked at askance?

The Oscars?

Hollywood

Does anyone have the original version in Latin?

I want to check if it's funny. (The only Latin that ever made me laugh - cry, in fact - was 'Romani eunt domus' in Monty Python's "Life of Brian"...)

Ok this is not a joke but it may make you laugh too: https://youtu.be/PbEKIW3pUUk

http://www.antiquitatem.com/en/a-joke-2000-years-old-augustu... has a bunch of recorded versions.

> 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.

Google translates this as:

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.

It has to be the emperor's mother for them to be closely related.

You're as closely related to your child as to your sibling: they share half your DNA in either case.

(This joke is clearly about the emperor's mother, though).

> clever answer

Well that depends on what happens next, but ending up being thrown to the lions would take the shine of the "clever" part

yeah,yeah.

But don't loose sight that this humor was a way of people to get their frustrations with the emperor out and let the little guy win.

thanks for pointing that out!

It is a 'yo momma' joke you uncultured swine.

Nah man... Your Dad (Emperor) didn't bang my Mom (Plebian).

My Dad (Plebian) BANGED YOUR MOM!!! (Empress probably)

> (Empress probably)

Augustus' parents were not emperor/empress--he was the first person to have that title.

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.

It starts as a 'yo momma' and turns into 'NO U'.

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.

If it was first Augustus it really would not have mattered too much. His father was rich true, but mother being Caesar's sister's daughter.

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.

Ah right, thank you. I thought that I had misinterpreted that he was older, but now that you point it out I realize that's why I thought that.

I think the "young man" part throws it off. Re-read without it, and the joke seems clearer.

It suggests they have the same father

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.

From a 1922 translation:

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..."

Because it’s impossible. He couldn’t do what his father is asking if he’s dead.

> The intellectual replied: "First murder your own children and then tell me to kill mine!"

Sounds like a clever way to say: "Over my dead body." Considering he's saying this to his own father.

In these jokes, is the word intellectual meant to be a substitute for “smartass”?

Given some context (another top comment has some jokes from the Philogelos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30838277 ), I believe it actually means student.

The jokes often reference their parents or classmates.

It made the joke above make sense to me, once I realized that.

It is funny because the squirrel gets dead.

I think that the joke is that the intellectual himself, and all of his siblings, were born from a slave.

I read an epigram by Martial when I was at school, it translated to:

You shave your head to conceal your baldness. How will you conceal your impotence?

I have that comment favorited and was just about to link it here; it's a good list!

He's suggesting that Augustus is his father? Or have the same father.

And his non-biological father is the one that regularly went out to the city ( not to cheat)

Correct?

So more like a brainteaser than a joke, i guess.

Now that's comedy. I love that people haven't changed that much in 1000s of years.