"Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." (Sumerian, 1900 BCE)
"What hangs at a man's thigh and wants to poke the hole that it's often poked before? A key." (British, 10th century)
"How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? Sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile -- and urge the pharaoh to go fishing." (Egyptian, 1600 BCE)
And the last, the Roman one from the 1st century BCE. Emperor Augustus is touring his realm and comes across a man who bears a striking resemblance to himself.
Intrigued, he asks the man: "Was your mother at one time in service at the palace?"
The man replies: "No, your highness, but my father was."The Roman one has a more complex structure with a specific dialogue-based punchline, which is of course a stronger way to build a joke than, say, the Egyptian one, which mostly just sounds like a true statement. Though it is good to know that the blonde jokes I've been hearing all my life have a long pedigree. "How do you get a ______ to _______?" is a pretty strong standby for any generalization joke, I suppose.
The Sumerian is pretty great too; how heartening to know that the idea of women having any kind of non-sexy bodily function is a source of humor that has been mined for so long. And the British one? I'm reminded of one of my first posts about what Mark Twain had to say about how to tell a story. His theory was that a British joketeller structures a comic story without "slur[ring] the nub; he shouts it at you—every time. And when he prints it...he italicizes it, puts some whooping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis. All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life." We definitely get a bit of that in the key joke though the BBC copyeditors kept it formatted normally; clearly you'd have to punctuate the end with emphasis or the joke wouldn't work at all.
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