By Walt Warner
Humor over the course of human history has been extraordinarily subjective, this is simply just a fact, there are images that people see and laugh at while others will look at the same thing and retract away. This being said, there are usually jokes and types of humor that certain people in certain generations find funnier than others. This article will present a semi–full timeline of the earliest recorded joke that I could find, all the way out to present day Gucci Morty.
According to The National Museum of Language, there were many jokes created within the 4–5 century C.E. in a collection called the Philogelos. The collection contains roughly 265 jokes. I took it upon myself to scour these jokes personally to find one that I thought was the “most funny.” After looking through some of the collection provided by TNML I found joke 4 to be the funniest, this is how it goes,
“An idiot is selling his horse, a potential buyer, curious about the horse’s age, asks whether or not it has lost its first set of teeth yet. ‘Oh, it’s lost its second set already’ says the idiot, “first it knocked out mine, then it knocked out my father’s.” This feels an awful lot like a dad joke–doesn’t it? Maybe some forms of humor do truly stand the test of time. The jokes presented in the text show a clear set up and subversion of expectation–this quite frankly surprised me, this format has been used for generations for all kinds of jokes and humor the classic “four guys walked into a bar” joke for example takes a similar tone and set up as the one from 5 C.E.
I do suppose that jokes and humor are very different things–jokes have a clear structure: there’s a setup and a punchline. Humor is a whole other beast, humor determines what someone finds funny and doesn’t. In the past humor was inside of jokes, wordplay, and mockery, but I feel as if it really has changed as time has gone on. Today with phones there are millions of jokes and millions of images that people can either be outraged over or find humorous. Things like ‘Gucci Morty’ which has just recently been revealed can make people laugh just by looking at it. This is completely different from things like comic strips or bishops and loose teeth. This kind of brainrot humor–that has been accelerated by the internet–is stupid: it’s ‘dumb humor.’ But maybe that’s the point of it. Gucci Morty is stupid which is exactly what makes people laugh. That’s all I have for you.
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