Michael Grade and the World's Oldest Joke

A man comes home after work and he says to his wife,

"Here, I've just met the butcher. And he tells me he's made love

"to every single woman in our street except one."

"Well," she says, "that'll be that stuck-up cow at number 21."

Well, it's a tough choice, but I have to say,

that's one of my all-time favourite gags.

It belongs to Max Miller and it's probably 60 years old.

But it still makes me laugh.

Please forgive me, I'm very tired. I've been shoplifting.

And some of those shops are very heavy, I'll tell you!

Sir! This slave you have sold me has just died.

My God! He never did such a thing when he belonged to me.

'In fact, is there such a thing as a new joke?

'I look at what made the Romans roar and what tickled the Tudors.'

There's a lot of jockeying for social position in telling a joke.

I've got a friend who's got a butler whose left arm is missing.

Serves him right.

In ancient Greece, for instance,

there was a joke club in which people would exchange jokes.

Morning, Socrates!

Morning, Plato!

-There's a lot to offend if you're not very...

-Not very PC?

No, no, no, no.

We're here to see whether old jokes can be funny.

I've been advertising for a wife but I've had 500 replies,

all from married men, offering me theirs.

There is no such thing as an old joke,

only jokes that people have heard before.

Do jokes pass across the centuries as easily as they travel

around the internet?

I intend to find out, as I go in search of the world's oldest joke.

'Wisecrack, gag, quip, jape, jest, pun.

'Call it what you like, sharing a joke is one of the most effective

'ways we bond with our fellow human beings. But how do we define a joke?

'For me, there's one man who can answer that question better

'than anyone else.'

What is a joke?

Ah! A joke!

Well, there are many different kinds of jokes.

If you look in the dictionary, a joke will tell you a joke is a jest,

a device to make people laugh.

Are there any accountants in the audience?

There's one! What's black and brown and looks good on an accountant?

A Rottweiler.

If you look way, way back to the origins of the word "joke",

you'll find that in Old English,

it really meant a trinket, a jewel.

So my grandad used to say to me, "Mike, don't watch your money.

"Watch your health."

And one day, whilst I was watching my health, someone stole my money.

It was my grandad.

To me, a joke is like a very expensive watch.

Can I have a look at yours, please? Yes.

Gosh! Gosh!

If you take an expensive watch

and just very carefully lift the back off, you'll see the mechanism,

all little balances and wheels and timings. And that's what a joke is.

That's why a joke has to be very carefully used.

Two cannibals in the jungle, having lunch together.

One says to the other one, "I don't like your wife."

And the other one says, "Well, just eat the chips, then."

It can be a story, it can be an anecdote, it can be a rhyme,

it can be a jingle. It's like saying the word "music".

There are all different kinds of music,

there's all different kinds of jokes.

What's this?

SHE BARKS

I don't know. What is that?

A vicious circle.

-Why do we need to laugh?

-It's happiness.

As you go through life, we're all searching for happiness.

It's a treasure.

It's a treasure that we all try to find, happiness, pleasure.

Pleasure and happiness are not quite the same thing,

but happiness is more important.

Happiness brings with it contentment and satisfaction.

And jokes can satisfy that need?

Jokes are really tickling the mind. Tickling the mind.

A polar bear walks into a bar and says to the barman,

"How much for a pint of bitter?"

And the barman says to him, "Well, that'll be £6, please."

And the polar bear says, "Well, how much for a glass of house red wine?"

And the barman says, "Well, that'll be £9."

"And what about a vodka, lime and lemonade?"

And the barman says, "Well, that'll be £13.50."

The barman says to him,

"I hope you don't mind, but we don't often get polar bears in here."

And the polar bear says, "Well, at these prices,

"I'm not bloody surprised."

When you stand on a stage and you actually tell a joke

and an audience laughs, that's a wonderful feeling.

It's a wonderful, fabulous feeling.

It's the same feeling that people get when they tell a friend a joke.

-What cheese do you use to hoax a bear from a tree?

-I don't know.

"Camem-bear."

They're asking for affection, they're asking for love,

they're asking for appreciation. And that's what entertainers do.

That's what comedians do.

A fella went into the police station

and said he'd been robbed by an elephant.

And the police sergeant said, "Was it an Indian elephant

"with little ears or was it an African elephant with big ears?"

He said, "I don't know. It had a stocking over its head."

-Can we learn from the joke books of the past?

-Oh, I think so. Yes.

I once got permission to visit and spend some time in

the Bodleian Library in Oxford

cos I was so... I wanted to know, what is a laugh?

Why do people laugh? How can you create laughter? What is a joke?

I wanted to know this. So I read all the books I could.

-I read some fabulous...

-Going back how far?

Oh, as far as the library had books on it.

Sigmund Freud wrote a book called

Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious.

The trouble is that Freud never played second house,

Friday night in Glasgow Empire.

This poor traffic warden, you know, he popped his clogs.

Stepped off, the traffic warden. And they had him all boxed up.

And they were loading him into the whole and suddenly, he came to life.

He came to life! And he knocked on the lid. And they rose him up again.

And they open the lid, and he sat up. He said, "I'm alive! I'm alive!"

The vicar said, "I'm sorry, sir. I've started the paperwork."

'Nowadays, you can find a joke about any subject.

'That wasn't always the case.

'In 1949, the BBC issued the Green Book, which laid out

'strict rules on what was and wasn't acceptable to joke about.'

There's an absolute ban on the following: lavatories,

effeminacy in men, immorality of any kind,

suggestive references to honeymoon couples, chambermaids,

fig leaves, prostitution, ladies' underwear, e.g. winter draws on,

animal habits, e.g. rabbits, lodgers, commercial travellers.

And extreme care should be taken in dealing with references to,

or jokes about, prenatal influences,

e.g. his mother was frightened by a donkey.

To find out how much jokes have changed

since that infamous Green Book, I've come to see my old friend,

Barry Cryer, joke teller and joke writer.

-Over the years, do you hear the same jokes coming round?

-Oh, yes.

-Decade after decade?

-The names change.

A joke with a name in it will always be used as a formula.

I remember, back in the '60s, saying about Harold Wilson,

if he fell off a cliff, he'd swear he was going up.

This is just a formula line, but I've used it about Tony Blair...

-Nick Clegg?

-Nick Clegg.

-How do you save George Osborne from drowning?

-I don't know. How do you?

Take your foot off his head.

Are old jokes just being re-clothed,

re-dressed up as new with new references, contemporary

references, but the jokes, the basic joke is centuries old?

All good jokes answer to the form, set it up, set the scene,

something happens during the scene and it ends with a surprise.

They want us to write that down!

A judge, who stopped a case stone cold in the middle of the afternoon,

apologised to the council and the jury and the witnesses

and said, "We've got to adjourn until tomorrow.

"I've left my notes on this case in a file at home in the country."

And one of the council stood up and said, "Fax it up, my lord."

He said, "Yes, it does rather, doesn't it?" We move on.

-Some jokes endure, some don't.

-Yes.

-Why?

Some of the best jokes are timeless, they're just about human nature.

Some jokes just go away because they're about pounds, shillings

and pence, or a topical theme at the time.

But the really great jokes are just about human nature,

so you can keep telling them.

Bloke's been on a night out.

He's so drunk he's thrown up all over himself.

He's like, "Oh, what am I going to do?" His mate says, "Don't worry.

"Listen, when you go home to the wife, stick 20 quid in your pocket,

"say someone else threw up on you, yeah?

"And they've given you 20 quid for the dry cleaning."

Bloke's like, "Brilliant!" Goes home, walks in.

Wife goes, "You've thrown up!" He's like, "No, no, look.

"Someone threw up on me and they've given me £20 for the dry cleaning."

She goes, "But why is there £40 there?"

He goes, "The other £20 is from the guy who shit in my pants."

'In the 1960s,

'a new kind of comedian arrived to rival the traditional joke tellers.'

Do you know what they call a tall, suave, sophisticated,

coloured, highly-educated university professor with three

degrees in nuclear physics in Alabama?

Nigger.

'Jokes became less formulaic and more political.

'With the emergence of alternative comedy in the 1980s,

'joke telling was firmly out of fashion.'

We still have the same government.

Even though we had an election, we have the same government.

Mrs Thatcher stormed Parliament for the third time.

We'd better be careful.

If she wins it again, they're going to have to let her keep it.

Jokes remained in real life. They always will do.

But I think it was suddenly regarded as...

Not suddenly, gradually regarded as rather old-fashioned, telling jokes.

And then there was a great breed of performers who just

talked about life and did routines about life.

And people thought, "Oh, this is refreshing."

Being Scottish, a lot of people think I'm a drunk.

And this is nonsense.

I just do drunk impersonations, you know,

to make people feel cosy wosy in the company of a Scotsman, you know?

And it's quite easy.

Scotsmen, drunk Scotsmen, especially drunk Glaswegians,

walk with one leg, like that.

People writing their own material, it was all part of a change.

Seachange was happening around that time.

And they ask everybody if they're all right all the time.

You all right?

Yeah, I'm all right. Who's talking to you?

'On a personal level, jokes travel from text to e-mail to dinner party,

'and we neither know nor care who wrote them,

'as long as they're funny.

'Until the middle of the 20th century,

'this was also true for professional comics, who would lift jokes,

'and even whole routines, from their peers.'

Now, ladies and gentlemen, you might have heard this joke told before,

but not as beautifully as I do it.

'However, with the introduction of television

'and dedicated comedy clubs,

'a joke became irrevocably associated

'with the first person to tell it.

'I've come to see Tim Vine for a modern comedian's

'thoughts on the subject.'

How many jokes do you actually know, and how many have you written,

-do you think?

-Well, that's a good question. I've probably written...

..I don't know, maybe a couple of thousand or something.

Robin Hood came up to me. I said, "Where do you keep your arrows?"

He said, "In a quiver." I said, "Where do you keep your arrows?"

All these gags that you've given birth to,

if you hear another comedian making a living, telling your material,

don't you get really angry?

When I was doing clubs, you were in a situation where you're more

vulnerable in that situation because someone could...

And it's happened, and it's very real, I think.

People from established comics have sat at the back,

writers for established comics, have sat at the back of this room

with a notepad and written down what some of these comics have said.

And then, the comics here, you know, will be watching telly one night

and suddenly discover someone doing it on the Royal Variety Show.

So that sort of thing, you know, naturally is going to...

-Upset you?

-Yes. Yeah, yeah.

You see, the advantage of easy origami is twofold.

With me, I had... There was an e-mail that went round, saying,

"These are Tommy Cooper jokes."

And it was a section of my act. And they weren't Tommy Cooper jokes.

-They were your originals?

-They were mine. I'd written them, yeah.

And this thing, this e-mail, because everyone loves Tommy, rightly,

it got very popular.

But at the time, me working on the circuit,

whenever I got to that patch, there was a period,

a couple of years, when I got to that patch,

I would occasionally hear someone going, "That's a Tommy Cooper joke."

In a situation like that, when you're on the stage and

you hear someone in the front, you want to go,

"No, it's not! I wrote it!"

You don't want to break out of your silly persona.

Today, I had dinner with my boss and his wife,

and it was a complete disaster. My boss's wife said to me,

"Tim, how many potatoes would you like?" "I'll just have one."

"All right, you don't have to be polite."

I said, "All right, then. I'll just have one, you stupid cow!"

Once you've told a joke, it gets into the public domain,

do people kind of forget where it comes from?

Do they come and tell you your own jokes back to you

when you're in the supermarket or wherever?

I have had that a couple of times, yeah. Yeah.

I think a taxi driver once said to me, "What do you think of this?

"You know all male tennis players are witches?

"For example, Goran, even he's a witch." And I said, "Oh, yeah. Yeah."

I don't think I had the heart to tell him that I made it up, actually.

I think I left it. I just said, "That's very funny."

So I was working in a health food shop. This bloke walked in.

He said, "Evening, primrose oil." I said, "Mr Vine to you."

One of the heroes of modern joke telling is Robert Orben,

a man who offered all his jokes up for public consumption

and saw them used by all the great comics of the day.

Well worth travelling 3,500 miles to meet him.

-Your jokes are quite short.

-That's right, one-liners.

-One-liners.

But that was not very popular through the years.

It's really the fast pace of living that has brought about one-liners.

A book fell on my head.

I only have my shelf to blame.

When you were writing these books, you were just writing jokes,

and everybody would take them and adapt them,

-find the ones that suited their personality.

-Absolutely.

So what I'm interested in is how,

in a room with a blank sheet of paper, you sit down

and you're disciplined and you say,

"I'm going to write three jokes today."

For most of my writing life,

I wrote 25 jokes a day, seven days a week.

And then, pared it down to what I thought was the funniest.

I take my children everywhere.

Unfortunately, they find their way home.

In those earlier days,

where you were working professionally as a gag writer,

the pressure not to write jokes about certain subjects,

did that come from the audience, from the advertisers?

Were people just afraid of the reaction or that was just

-the culture at the time?

-The general culture, and that has changed.

And I want to say that the Johnsons they are lovely people.

I'm very fond of them, particularly Mrs Johnson.

She's so jolly and fat, she's two of the finest women I ever saw.

To show you how fat she is,

she fell down one day and rocked herself to sleep, trying to get up.

Sexist jokes no longer work.

Women now will boo a comedian who starts getting involved with

sexist material.

I used to call my girlfriend Melancholy Baby

because she had a head like a melon and a face like a collie.

That was not acceptable. Now, it's totally not acceptable.

-Do you cringe when you...

-Oh, yes. Yes.

At one point, we were putting together a Doubleday book that

sort of mashed together four of my other books.

And out of 9,000 jokes that I went through...

I threw out 2,000 as being sexist.

I beat my wife up this morning.

I got up at seven, she got up at eight.

Should we talk about clowns?

Cheers.

'For as long as civilisation has existed, the comedian, too,

'has existed in the form of a joker, a jester or clown.

'Ancient Native Americans believed that only by laughing could

'you contact the gods,

'so clowns were present at all religious ceremonies.

'At the Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror's joker was

'the first man to be killed.

'He was sent out in front of the troops to provoke

'the English into attack.

'Possibly the first comic to die a death, literally.

'Even in Victorian times,

'a clown was equally at home on a stage as in a circus.

'Dr Ann Featherstone recently discovered Victorian clown

'Thomas Lawrence's gag book, a fascinating

'and rare example of a 19th-century jokesmith's catalogue of works.'

What this discovery shows is the incredible

importance of the joke book to the comedian.

When Bob Monkhouse's joke books were stolen,

he offered a reward of £10,000 for the return of what he called

his precious babies,

and that was a hell of a lot of money in those days.

Now, Ann, I can see you trembling here. You're very excited.

What is it you've got for us?

-I have in my hand a Victorian clown's gag book.

-A clown's gag book?

Why does a clown need a gag book?

Clowns are physical comedians, they're not verbal.

Ah, well, in the 19th century, a clown could be a singing,

talking, as well as a physical clown.

If William Penn's aunts had a pie shop, how much would the pies cost?

The "pie-rates" of "Penn's Aunts".

-So clowns did jokes?

-Yes.

I suspect, correct me if I'm wrong,

what you've got here, with Lawrence and his ilk,

-is the origins of the stand-up comedian.

-Yes.

What's the difference between a rowing boat and Joan of Arc?

One's made of wood, the other's "Maid of Orleans".

This is the copy that he has at the side of the ring

and flips through really quickly. He knows where the material is.

And this is just full of material, comedy material?

Comedy material, what a clown would call wheezes.

Marriage is like bathing in cold water.

One plunge and it's all over.

Is any of it still funny, do you think?

-There were certain things which Victorians found funny.

-Like?

Like marriage, love, misfortune

and women, women in all shapes and sizes.

You know, I'm very fond of the ladies.

I say bless those wives that fill our lives

With little bees and honey

They ease life's shocks they mend our socks

But can't they spend the money?

There may be as many groans as laughs.

But you went to the circus to hear the same stuff.

You weren't really going there to hear novelty, to hear new jokes.

-Actually, you were quite happy to hear...

-The familiar?

The familiar ones, over and over and over again.

Bad husbands are like bad coals.

They smoke, they go out and they don't keep the pot boiling.

These audiences were Victorian.

You think immediately of prudish, very po-faced, very retentive.

-So you'd expect the material to be very prim and proper.

-Mm.

No, not really.

-There's a lot to offend if you're not careful.

-Not very PC?

No, no, no, no. No, no.

We've got a wheeze that he calls Blacksmith's Daughter,

-which is quite a misogynistic piece.

-Was that typical of the period?

Oh, yes. He says, "She's an uncommon sort of girl.

"There was a neatness in her style of dress. Did you notice the bonnet?

"Wasn't it a little duck?"

I gave her that.

"Then her boots. Did you see them?"

I gave her that.

"And her jacket. Did you take notice of that? Wasn't it a beauty?"

I gave her that.

"And her eyes. You must have noticed them.

"Yes, they were black," says the ringmaster. "Yes."

I gave her those.

-That would... I guess would raise a laugh.

-I'm sure it would, yes.

But we might find it a bit awkward these days.

'As well as a love of wordplay

'and a rather dubious attitude towards women, Victorian jokes also

'revealed concerns about new advances in industry.'

Did you hear today about the accident?

Three men run over by a train? They were saved by a miracle.

The train was going over a bridge and they were going under it.

'And, of course, the creation of a police force in 1829 gave them

'a whole new target.'

Policeman are like rainbows.

They never appear until a storm is over.

You obviously know the material that's in here.

Do you ever hear it, if you watch television or see a movie or

go to a show or something, and say, "Wow!

-"I can see that gag coming from Thomas Lawrence's book"?

-Yes.

-Can you give us an example?

-Absolutely.

There's one called Tragedy. And I think, if you listen to it,

you realise that you've heard this, in a sense, before,

-but in a more modern context.

-OK.

So we have to imagine that Tom is in the middle of the ring,

and he's got to fill, probably, two minutes.

And maybe it's a restless audience.

So he needs to do something really dramatic.

So he says, "Thou rememberest well, the night was dark

"and tempestuous when a sudden and terrific storm broke o'er our heads."

I just happened to glance at the night sky,

and I marvelled at the millions of stars glistening like pieces

of quicksilver thrown carelessly onto black velvet.

"The rain fell in torrents,

"the forked lightning flashed through the murky skies, the horrid artillery

"of heaven rolled as if it were about to burst the fiery element."

In awe, I watched the waxen moon ride across the zenith

of the heavens like an amber chariot towards the ebony void

of infinite space, wherein the tethered bolts...

..of Jupiter and Mars hang for ever, festooned in their orbital majesty.

"All nature seemed as though chaos was come again,

"when a voice, a giant's voice,

"was heard above the roaring of the waters,

"a voice that sounded from East to West, from North to South,

"from hill to hill, from cataract to cavern.

"A voice proclaimed aloud to the affrighted world..."

"I must put a roof on this lavatory."

"Have you got a clean shirt for Sunday?"

HE LAUGHS

Very well done! Well done. Very good.

'What Thomas Lawrence's joke book highlights is that jokes often

'rely on social context,

'so what was funny to one generation is distinctly unfunny to the next.'

For example, the ancient Greeks liked nothing more

than a good lettuce gag. Not many gems there.

But how do you make one of those very old jokes

funny for today's audience?

Is it in the actual words or is it in the way I tell them?

I've come to Canterbury to meet Oliver Double,

who teaches historical performance and comedy.

-Nice to see you.

-Good to see you. Got any new jokes for us.

We're going to join one of his classes as they attempt

to breathe new life into some very old jokes.

We're here to see whether old jokes can be funny.

It's never held me back.

Absolutely. I've brought some old joke books.

This is One Liners by Robert Orben, that was published in 1951.

My Best Scotch Stories by Sir Harry Lauder,

one of the music hall greats, that's from 1929.

And Lewis and Faye Copeland's 10,000 Jokes, Toasts And Stories,

which actually contains 10,065.

We're going to do a vocal warm-up now

because one of the things about comedians from decades past,

was that the delivery was often more formal than you get now.

-Think no mic.

-Yes, exactly.

If you had no mic, you've got to be heard at the back

of the Hackney Empire or whatever.

We're going to start off with resonators.

You can make different parts of your body resonate

to make it louder and that makes your voice sound a different way.

-NASAL VOICE:

-Have you had elocution lessons?

-Funny you should say that!

-No.

-How very posh.

Bit of a ladies' man is what I tend to do with my day.

Do you find that voice attractive?

-Do you, Michael?

-No, not terribly.

Well, I don't know then.

Maybe I'll have more success with a higher voice. How about up here?

-How about now?

-I think it needs to be deeper. The deeper the better.

-OK, right.

-There's a great joke about a fellow goes into a pub and says...

-NASAL VOICE:

-"Excuse me, barman, can I have a pint of beer, please?

And the barman says...

-NASAL VOICE:

-"Certainly, sir." And he looks at him.

"Are you taking the piss out of me?" The barman says, "No, I'm not.

"I always talk like this." "All right then."

An RAF guy comes in.

-UPPER CLASS VOICE:

-"I say, barman.

"A large gin and tonic with a dash of angostura." The barman says...

-UPPER CLASS VOICE:

-"Certainly, sir. Right away.

"That'll be 3 and 9, thank you very much."

"Thank you very much." "Here," says the other fellow.

"I told you you were taking the piss out of me."

"No," says the barman. "I was taking the piss out of him."

There is a lot of jockeying for social position in telling a joke,

which is why it can be a bit scary even just telling a joke

to a group of strangers that you've not met before,

because if it falls flat, your stock has fallen now

and people think of you a little bit sadder than they thought before.

On the other hand, if it gets a huge laugh, your stock has gone up.

I would like you to think of a joke from the jokes you've been given

from the books, and I'd like you to think about

how you could tell it and also thinking about

how you can really punch it home by getting the rhythm.

Make it funny.

Why do you always call your wife Honey, Mr Brown?

Well, honey has always disagreed with me.

"Did you hear about the awful fright George got at his wedding?"

"Oh, yes, I was there. I saw her."

I said to the wife, "I'm homesick." She said, "You're home."

I said, "Yes, I know, and I'm sick of it."

-Do you think you could tell those jokes now?

-Ironically.

Would you take that joke, the basic joke and turn it into something?

I did that. I scribbled other ones.

"I'd like a room for my wife and myself." He goes, "Suite, sir?"

He goes, "Yes, she's rather perfect."

Which I thought was far too twee

so I said, "No, she is a pain in the arse."

Some of them are just devastatingly sinister.

For example, there's this one. "Never speak of the dead

"unless you have something good to say about them.

"My wife is dead. Good."

Is there a sort of PC filter reading these jokes?

As colloquialisms and stuff go, they just go really over the head.

Young husband, "I see that sugar has gone down two points."

Young wife, "Has it? I'll get a couple of pounds today then."

Likewise, some of them are good, I think.

There is one, "Good morning, Mrs Smith. I'm from the gas company.

"I understand there's something in the house that won't work."

"Yes, he's upstairs." I like that, it really made me chuckle.

It's one form of entertainment

that everybody participates in, don't they?

Everybody tells jokes.

In the office, in the pub,

-at football, at bingo, wherever you are.

-It is folkloric.

-New ones as well, that's really weird.

-Are there any new jokes?

What I'm talking about is when there's a disaster

or something topical happens,

the jokes start maybe 12 hours after it's come on the news.

Now, we know that they travel by Facebook and the internet

and text and all of that, viral e-mails and all that stuff.

But that used to happen.

It used to happen 20, 30 years ago before the internet

and it's just bizarre.

How can those jokes be generated so quickly

and how can they travel so quickly?

I have an image of one really sick guy in a cellar with a laptop

just going, "Ha ha!"

Just going, "Yeah, ten people died in a fire,"

and psychically beaming it into people's minds.

What did Osama bin Laden cook on MasterChef?

Big Apple Crumble.

The joke books used by the university students may now seem

out of date but look in the humour section of any bookshop

and you will see that joke books are still hugely popular.

Probably the most famous English joke book

is Joe Miller's Jests published about 300 years ago

and still in print today.

A famous teacher of arithmetic who had long since been married

without being able to get his wife with child once said to her,

"Madam, your husband is an expert mathematician."

"Yes," replied she. "Only he can't multiply."

However, it's not just the contents that are of interest.

The book itself is one of the most successful jokes in history.

Joe Miller's Jests, first published in 1759

and named after a famous stage comedian

was actually released the year after his death

in a bid to cash in on his fame.

Reprinted and added to many times, the original edition contain jokes

about everything from Irish men, bad breath, loose women to lawyers.

The real joke known only to his closest friends

was that off-stage, Joe was as serious as they come.

He was the world's worst joke teller and he could neither read nor write.

A gentleman said of a young wench who constantly plied her trade

round the Temple that if she had as much law in her head

as she had in her tail, she'd be the ablest counsel in England.

So it was that Joe Miller, who had never told a jest in his life,

became the author of so many jokes past and present in a book

he'd never heard of and which he couldn't read anyway.

An Irish lawyer having occasion to go to dinner

left these directions written.

"I have gone to the Elephant And Castle where you shall find me.

"If you don't know how to read,

"take this to a stationers who will read it for you."

Like so many historical documents,

the fact that a joke's written down usually means it has

a much older oral history so they're very hard to date.

We can trace some old jokes back

to the very first time they're in print.

The most famous joke of all time,

"Why did the chicken cross the road,"

first appeared in the March 1847 issue of New York Monthly magazine.

Other popular jokes can be traced back to even earlier texts.

The Elizabethans for example loved a good laugh.

So much so they created the first English joke book -

the Hundred Merry Tales.

I'm hoping English Professor Carol Rutter can tell me a lot more.

Carol, The Merry Tales - what is it, where does it come from?

It was published in 1526 and it's a compendium of merry stories

that talk about stupid priests, children who can't learn things,

dumb wives.

At a merchant's house in London,

there lived a maid who was big with child.

The mistress of the house commanded her to tell her

who was the father of the child.

The maid answered, "Forsooth, nobody."

"What?" exclaimed the mistress. "This is not possible.

"Someone must be the father." The maid answered, "Why, Mistress.

"Why can't I have a child without a man

"just as the hen lays eggs without a cock?"

Are they bawdy, scatological?

Of course, because that's one of the things we adore about the joke.

In making us consult our own humanity.

We spend so much time in our mental faculties,

the joke reminds us that we're human.

That we have lower parts.

What is the most cleanliest leaf?

The holly leaf, because no-one will wipe their arse with it.

I think that the culture I'm looking at when I'm reading these tales

is much closer to real body functions

that we of course have put into cabinets,

so we put them off camera all the time.

A young gentleman of 20 years talked with a gentlewoman who happened

to look upon his beard, which being young was somewhat over his lip

but very little beneath.

So she said to him, "Sir, ye have beard above but none below."

He hearing her so said in sport,

"Madam, you have beard beneath but none above."

"Marry," said she, "then set one against the other."

Which made the gentleman so abashed he had not one word to answer.

Apart from the stock figures of stupid clergyman,

unfaithful wives, mass immigration from Wales in Tudor times

also meant the introduction of the Welshman as a figure of ridicule.

They're lived in Heaven a group of Welshmen

whose babbling and boasting annoyed everybody there.

God then told St Peter that he was weary of these Welshmen

and would be glad to have them out of heaven.

St Peter then ran out through the heavenly gates

and cried out in a loud voice, "Roasted cheese!"

This being a delicacy of which Welshmen are very fond.

They all ran out of Heaven at a brisk pace.

St Peter seeming the whole group outside suddenly re-entered Heaven,

locked the gates, thus keeping the Welshmen out of heaven.

And then interestingly, because this is a Tudor book, these tales

also include a little tag at the end that help you moralise the tale.

And by this tale we may see that man is not wise to set his mind

too much on delicacies or earthly pleasures, for in this,

he may lose his celestial and eternal joy.

100 Merry Tales is also known as Shakespeare's Jest Book,

because he was known to borrow liberally from it.

But more importantly to us perhaps, the Bard gives us

the very first written example of a type of joke still told today.

Knock, knock, knock. Who's there, in the name of Beelzebub?

He is a farmer that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty.

Come and dine. Have napkins and how about you?

You'll sweat for it.

Apparently, that was what the Elizabethans called satire.

I guess you had to be there(!)

It's very comforting, isn't it, that the

English have had a sense of humour all the way back to Tudor times?

Not a lot's changed.

-Knock knock.

-Who's there?

-Europe.

-Europe who?

No, you're a poo!

LAUGHTER

Have you heard the one about the papal secretary?

He came to London and got the piles and at the same time,

he revived the lost art of joke telling.

His name was Poggio - Poggio Bracciolini,

and he stayed here in London at the townhouse

of the Bishop of Winchester, which is right behind me.

No wonder he got the farmers!

The farmer Giles...piles, you see?

Poggio is a very,

very important figure in the history of the joke and if it weren't for

Poggio, I suspect that many of today's comedians

would not be working.

Who was he? First of all, when was he is the most important thing?

He was born in 1380, in a little town near Florence.

By the time he was in his mid-20s, he was in Rome

with a job as a scripter in the papal court.

He and his friends and his enemies within the civil service

in the papal court, would get together after a long day's work,

and exchange insults and stories and jokes.

The good people of Tivoli were once harangued by an imprudent monk,

who funded a long and furious speech against the sin of adultery.

Among other things, he declared, that the

violation of the sanctity of wedlock was a crime of such grave character,

that he'd rather lie with ten virgins than one married woman.

And many of those present were of the same opinion.

He had the idea of writing them all down. The first great joke book.

Exactly. He wrote them down years later.

He wanted to remember some of these funny stories.

One day, the sea being rough, all those aboard the ship were

ordered by the captain to throw overboard their heaviest belongings.

There was among them, a man who took hold of his wife to cast her aboard.

For, he said,

she was the heaviest and most burdensome thing he possessed.

The Liber Facetiarum, usually called simply the Facetiae,

was the first volume of its kind to be published in Europe.

It contains fat jokes, drunk jokes, sex jokes and fart jokes,

as well as a lot of jokes about randy or corrupt priests.

An old bishop who I knew,

complained that he lost a number of his teeth already and that the

others were shaking so badly, that he feared he'd lose those also.

At this, a man of the district said, "You shall not fear.

"You'll not lose your teeth."

"Why not?" asked the bishop, curiously.

"My testicles have been hanging loose these last 40 years,

"seemingly at the point of falling off, yet I've never lost them!"

The reason why we don't have a lot of joke books

from the 600 and 700 years before Poggio, is because the monks,

the monasteries had a bit of an monopoly on book production.

Because it was expensive and because they...

-It was labour-intensive. It took forever.

-Very labour-intensive.

For all we know, they may have told a lot of jokes.

I suspect they probably did. Human beings do.

One day, in order to entertain Lorenzo di Medici, an ambassador

bought a boy of some five or six years,

who had extraordinary talent and wit.

When the boy had made everyone wonder, Lorenzo turned to

the ambassador and asked him what he thought of the child.

The boy's brains will be grown for certain when he is grown-up,

but, replied the ambassador, children who are very clever when they are

little, become very dull and commonplace when they are grown.

The boy turned to the ambassador and said, "Why sir,

"you must have been extremely clever when you were little!"

-He did actually come to London at one point.

-He did.

He came to London round about 1420.

-He absolutely hated it.

-Oh!

He wrote letters home complaining about the people,

they were stupid and ignorant

and didn't like books as much as he did.

The weather was terrible and he had terrible piles.

Have you got any examples of his English jokes or his

-anti-English jokes?

-As it happens, I do.

This is a joke about an Englishman at a banquet.

A beaker of wine was once brought to an Englishman at a banquet

and all present took their wine from it.

While the Englishman was putting it to his lips

he saw a dead fly in it, which he took out.

Then, after having taken his drink,

he replaced the dead fly in the wine.

Asked why he did this, he replied, I personally don't like flies

in my wine, but how am I to know if some of you do not like them?

-He handed on the beaker.

-There you are, the first fly-in-my-soup joke.

Exactly. There's actually an Irish joke.

-The earliest recorded joke about a stupid Irishman...

-Really?

..is in his book.

The Irish captain of a merchant vessel was caught in a storm.

His ship was so buffeted

and tossed by the tempest that he despaired he'd ever save her.

The captain made a vow, that if she was saved, he'd make an ex-voto

of a huge candle that would be as big as the master of his ship.

When a friend said to him, that such a vow was impossible as there was not

enough wax in all of England to make such a candle,

the captain said, "Be quiet,

"and let me promise what I want to the mother of God,

"for when we're all saved, she will be as happy with a penny candle!"

Are there any jokes that you've actually laughed out loud at

-when you read them?

-There are some excellent jokes in there.

Most of them are far too filthy,

this is the thing we haven't really talked about

and it might surprise people because Poggio worked for the Pope.

There's a lot of jokes about religion in there,

-but it's as blue as they come.

-Really? Filthy?

-Yeah.

-Absolutely filthy.

-Surprisingly at the time

the Facetiae was published,

not a word of condemnation was heard from the Vatican.

This was probably due to the fact that they were written in Latin,

which meant they were safe to be enjoyed by the learned,

without corrupting the masses.

Later commentators, however, were not so broad-minded.

In 1802, the Reverend William Shepherd,

the author of Poggio's biography,

expressed his shock that, "an apostolic secretary who

"enjoyed the friendship and esteem of the pontiff,

"should have published a number of stories which outraged

"the laws of decency and put modesty to the blush."

A young woman of Florence, who was not richly endowed with wisdom,

lay at the point of childbirth and suffered terrible pain.

When her travail endured for a long time, the midwife took a candle

and looked below to see if there was any sign of the child.

At this, the suffering woman instructed her to also look

behind for the child, insomuch as her husband had, on occasion,

also used the back road! Ohh!

-I think we owe Poggio a very great deal, don't you?

-I think we do.

We know that jokes do travel as part of an oral tradition,

they travel from country to country and from person-to-person.

he's the first writer to really get jokes into print.

His mixture of high-minded scholarship

and a love of filthy jokes is a laudable one and it makes him

quite a lovable character really.

A Florentine had in his household a young man

who used to tutor his children.

The tutor eventually felt so at home that he had, in turn,

the housemaid, the nurse and finally the mistress herself.

The master of the house when he discovered this,

summoned the young man and said to him,

"I find it unmannerly of you, sir.

"You take your pleasure of my entire household

"and you make an exception of me?"

Poggio's influence is still around today. Have a listen to this.

A guy runs over a cat and feels really bad about it,

so goes to the address on the cat's collar.

A little old lady answers the door

and he says, "I am really sorry, I've run over your cat and killed it.

"Can I replace it?"

The old lady thinks for a while and then she says,

"How good are you at catching mice?"

LAUGHTER

Now, watch this.

Matteo Franco, whose cat mewed when he pulled its ears,

threw the cat out of the window, saying, now I will catch my own mice.

Before Poggio, you have to go back

about 1,000 years to find a good joke book.

But this one is the grandaddy of them all.

If you think the joke you are about to see is old, you are right.

But it's a lot older than you think.

Doctor, doctor, I keep hurting my arm in lots of different places.

Well, stop going there, then!

LAUGHTER

The joke is sometimes said to have been invented by Palamedes,

the hero of Greek legend.

However, as he is also credited with inventing numbers, the alphabet,

lighthouses, dice and the practice of eating meals

at regular intervals, we should take that with a pinch of salt.

What we do know is that the oldest surviving joke book is from

ancient Greece and it is full of subjects we still make jokes about -

drunks, stupid people and the very first doctor doctor joke.

Professor John Morgan can tell us more.

John, are they funny today, some of them?

There are individuals like myself who find them funny, yeah!

When I try them on my students, they generally groan and roll their eyes.

Doctor, doctor, when I wake up in the morning,

I felt dizzy for half an hour.

Then get up half an hour later!

What we learn from this is that joke telling us we know it today,

goes all the way back, people told jokes back in the days

of the Greeks and Romans.

We do know there were joke books in existence

at least in the fifth century before Christ.

One man says to the other, "I had your wife last night.

"As her husband, I have to," came the reply. "What's your excuse?

What sort of people were the butts of the jokes,

because every joke has to be at the expense of somebody, doesn't it?

Most of the jokes in this collection are aimed at people

called a scholasticos, the professor or a student,

some kind of useless academic, so academic he has become an idiot.

There are one or two which are aimed at ethnic targets

or people from neighbouring cities,

so you can tell jokes about your stupid neighbours.

Like our Irish jokes or the French making jokes about the Belgians,

-Americans about the Canadians?

-In Swansea, we tell Llanelli jokes.

A Chymian goes to visit his friend

and stands outside his house shouting for him.

A neighbour sticks his head out of the window and says, "Hey,

"shout louder, then he'll hear you."

So the Chymian goes, "Oi, louder."

What purpose do you think a joke book served?

What was the need for a joke book?

One context is that these are tools for dinner parties.

We know that there was quite a widespread class

of people in Rome particularly, but also in Greece, called parasites.

These were people who scrounged at the tables of rich men

and earned their keep by being witty and humorous

and good conversationalists.

At a woman's funeral, a stranger solemnly asks, "Who is resting here?"

"I am, cried the widower, now that she's gone!"

Another is that it was written for circulation in barbers' shops,

because the barber shop in the ancient world,

was not just a place where you were in and out of in ten minutes.

It was a place where you'd go and have a drink

and talk to your friends and swap the gossip

and we know that it was a place where news was exchanged.

So a book of jokes for a barber to tell his customers

or for people to take to the barber's shop was quite popular.

A barber asked his client how he'd like his hair cut.

In silence, came the reply.

Unlike their later counterparts, the jokes in the Philogelos

are short and pointed.

They take on a gallery of stock characters - the doctor,

the drunk, the miser, the braggart, and the scholasticos.

A scholastic sees a deep well in his own field

and asks if the water is drinkable.

His farmhand tells him that his parents used to drink from it.

"Oh," says the scholasticos, "what long necks they must have had,"

There aren't too many sort of bum and willy jokes,

-but there are jokes about people with hernias.

-Hernias?

-Hernias.

-Gracious. Hernias are funny in that period!

-Apparently.

What did the Abderite eunuch get for his birthday?

A hernia!

What? A hernia!

No? Ehh...

There are also jokes about people with bad breath which must

-have been...

-No toothpaste.

-No toothpaste. No dental hygiene.

I imagine people just had mouths full of decaying teeth, so there is

a nice joke about a man with bad breath who goes to the doctor.

He says, "Doctor, doctor, I think my uvula has come down."

The doctor says, "Open your mouth.

"Oh, no, it's not your uvula that has come down,

"it is your arsehole that's come up!"

MICHAEL LAUGHS HEARTILY

-Very good! Very good!

-You see the calibre of the jokes?

-Yes, yes.

Those are jokes about people's shortcomings and misfortunes,

aren't they really?

It's another way of making a bond between the audience

and the teller, against someone who's different from themselves.

Did you hear about the Abderite

who heard that onions and cabbage cause wind?

He took a sack of the vegetables out sailing with them

and hung them from the stern!

The Philegelos was lost during the Dark Ages and with it,

seemingly the art of the joke.

But humour was kept alive by folk tales, which made their way

over from the Middle East.

Once in Europe, they began to separate -

on the one hand with the invention of printing

and the rise of literacy, they grew longer,

turning into chivalric romance and finally the novel.

In their oral form, however, they got shorter, shedding details

and growing more formulaic, condensing into the kinds

of jokes catalogued by Poggio and 100 Merry Tales.

Surprisingly then, it is during the Dark Ages, that we find

what are considered the first very English jokes.

GREGORIAN STYLE CHANTING

The Exeter Codex

is the oldest surviving book of English literature.

Scribed by monks, it contains a vast number of religious poems,

which would have been chanted on-site.

However, nestled amongst these, are about 90 riddles,

a number of which are most definitely not suitable for church.

What hangs by a man's thigh?

Stiff and it's strong.

It likes to poke a hole that it's often poked before.

A key!

So while the people of the 10th century

might have found the Exeter riddles funny,

I am not sure they are side-splitting to today's ears.

But it is good to know the monks enjoyed a good knob gag.

To find out why some jokes stand the test of time and some just don't,

I have come to talk to Paul Mcdonald who has made a study of the subject.

He also claims to have discovered the world's oldest joke.

It's amazing, you know, hundreds and hundreds

and hundreds of years ago, people are telling jokes,

maybe different jokes in a different way and a different setting,

but they feel the need to tell jokes and make people laugh.

How do you entertain a bored pharaoh?

You get a boatload of young women,

dressed only in fishing nets and you sail them down the Nile.

And you urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.

The first jokes would have been practical jokes.

There's a theory called the false alarm theory, which suggests

that laughter was a response to something that was originally

perceived as dangerous, but which turned out to be benign.

So, somebody would see something that they thought was a lion.

Their adrenaline would start pumping as a consequence of that.

It would turn out to be a donkey. And they would relax.

And that relaxation was a pleasurable experience.

So the earliest jokes

would have been people trying to surprise people.

To recreate that pleasure.

-Knock, knock.

-Who's there?

-The interrupting doctor.

-Interrup...

-You have cancer!

LAUGHTER

Then when people began to develop the cerebral capacity

to recreate these things in language,

that's what they did in the form of jokes.

Jesus is on the gates of heaven and he suddenly sees an old man.

And he says to the old man, "What are you doing here?"

The old man says, "I am here to find my son." Jesus says, "Tell me more."

"He says he was a special boy." And Jesus says, "Tell me more."

And he says, "Well, he had holes in his hands and holes in his feet."

And Jesus goes, "Father!" And the old man goes, "Pinocchio!"

Have you seen a consistent thread of things that people laugh about

over the centuries?

People tend to laugh at sex.

-I had sex with one of me old girlfriends the other night.

-Really?

Yeah, she's 96!

There are lots and lots of jokes throughout the history of joking

that challenge authority in various ways.

Politicians and nappies have one thing in common.

They should both be changed regularly and for the same reason.

LAUGHTER

Jokes about stupidity you can find in the earliest examples.

It's always other people's stupidity. You pick on a group.

-You make jokes about them.

-Yeah, I think so.

Blaming other people for the problems

that any society encounters, I suppose.

It tends to be humour that makes us feel better about ourselves.

Irishman fell 100 foot down a pit shaft. Crash!

And they shouted down to him, "Paddy, did you break anything?"

He said, "No, there's nothing down here!"

How important is the social context of a joke?

It's crucial, in a manner of speaking.

Jokes are very context dependent.

So, for instance, there are jokes in the earliest existing joke book,

that feature lettuce, for instance. Lettuce was hilarious.

If you read those jokes that feature lettuce,

you won't understand why they're funny,

but if you know that lettuce was considered to be an aphrodisiac

1,500 years ago, then, the comic import of that material

-becomes obvious.

-It's a Viagra joke.

-They're essentially Viagra jokes.

A scholasticos sits down to dinner with his dad.

And before him sits a huge lettuce with lots of sprouts going off it.

The scholasticos goes, "Eh, father, you eat the children

"and I'll eat the mother!" Ohh!

How on earth are you find the world's oldest joke?

What set you on the path?

You have to go to the world's oldest texts

and the world's oldest texts are the texts written in cuneiform,

an early form of writing, in Ancient Sumer.

And because humour is fundamental to the human condition, there is

a very good chance that humour is going to feature in those texts.

Which it does.

And so, I looked through the riddles and proverbs,

the short narratives, in other words, and tried to identify those

narratives that had incongruities

of a kind that you associate with joking.

DRUM ROLL

'Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the world's oldest joke.'

Something which has not occurred since time immemorial.

That a young woman did not fart in her husband's embrace.

APPLAUSE

AUDIENCE CHEERS

AUDIENCE BOOS

-How far back can you trace that one?

-About 4,000 years old.

Is it really? So, yes, 1,800 BC.

So one assumes it was in circulation before it was actually documented.

What did you learn from that?

What does that teach us about jokes and joke telling?

Well, it teaches us that flatulence is funny!

-There's something inherently funny.

-It's still funny.

-It's still funny.

There's this guy standing in a bar having a pint.

All of a sudden, he lets off this enormous fart.

The man next to him taps him on the shoulder and says,

"Excuse me, you've just farted in front of my wife."

The guy turns round and says, "I'm really sorry,

"I didn't know it was her turn."

LAUGHTER

So, there you have it. The world's oldest joke is a fart joke.

Well, given the odd herniated eunuch and some limp lettuce leaves,

I guess we're still laughing at the same stuff our ancestors

laughed at, thousands of years ago.

As Gertrude Stein so rightly said, "A joke is a joke is a joke,

"so long as it's funny!"

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