This is part one of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. The episode appears in podcast feeds under the title, "Jokes, Part I: Sumer Funny, Sumer Not."

In the late 1800s, archeologists in Iraq uncovered an ancient clay tablet with a peculiar yet familiar line of text. Scrawled in tiny, wedge-shaped characters was what is arguably the worlds first documented bar joke.

The tablet is 4,000 years old, nearly from the dawn of writing. Roughly translated from the dead language of Sumerian, the joke reads: A dog walks into a bar and says, I cannot see a thing. Ill open this one.

Get it? Scholars certainly did not. Nor did the thousands of Twitter and Reddit users who responded to a viral post about the joke in March. It was probably some type of pun based on word pronunciation, wrote one person. Another guessed that the line was akin to a New Yorker cartoon offering a vignette of life in Sumer, the earliest civilization in southern Mesopotamia.

The temptation to decode the joke from a bygone era was palpable partly because understanding it could reveal something unique about early human civilization.

In this episode, the first of two parts, Endless Thread journeys back in time, attempting to deconstruct the origins of humor and explain an unexplainable joke from the forgotten tablets of the past.

Episode producer: Dean Russell

Co-hosts: Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson

Show producers: Megan Cattel, Dean Russell, Nora Saks, Grace Tatter, Kristin Torres, and Quincy Walters

Web producer: Kristin Torres

Mixer and sound designer: Emily Jankowski

Show notes

Support the show:

We love making Endless Thread, and we want to be able to keep making it far into the future. If you want that too, we would deeply appreciate your contribution to our work in any amount. Everyone who makes a monthly donation will get access to exclusive bonus content.Click here for the donation page. Thank you!

This content was originally created for audio. The transcript has been edited from our original script for clarity. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Ben Brock Johnson: Lets do the jokes. Lets make some jokes.

Amory Sivertson: (Laughs.) Knock, knock.

Ben: Whos there?

Amory: Oh god, I didnt have anything to say after that.

Ben: A few weeks ago, Amory and I hopped in my car and headed south from Boston. We had jokes on the brain. Sort of.

Ben: You still havent finished your joke.

Amory: I know, Im trying to think of any jokes I actually know, but like

Amory: In fairness, I was driving. We were on our way to Philadelphia in search of this one particular joke one that we were told was sitting in a dark storage cabinet, scrawled on an ancient block of clay.

Amory: Im not really blonde, but I know a blonde joke.

Ben: OK, lets hear it.

Amory: What do you call a blonde (Laughs.)

Ben: Apparently, this joke is hilarious. I wouldnt know.

Amory: Its just how I am. What do you (Laughs.)

Ben: This joke we were looking for is not a blonde joke. Its a bar joke; historys first recorded X walks into a bar. The joke is 4,000 years old from the infancy of written language. And it serves as a key mile marker in the evolution of humans and, specifically, our humor.

Amory: But theres one little problem, a mystery that has been bugging scholars for decades since the joke was unearthed. This joke, it is not that funny because nobody gets it at least, nobody still alive.

(Montage of WBUR staffers and friends.)

Marquis Neal: (Chuckle.) What the f***? (Laughs.)

Dan Mauzy: I dont get it. I dont get it.

Saurabh Datar: Maybe Im too stupid to understand this joke.

Kelvin Brooks: I dont have an answer nor a laugh for that.

Quiana Scott-Ferguson: I dont get it. (Laughs.)

Marquis: I got questions, and you dont have no answers. So you got to figure it out. (Laughs.)

Ben: Im Ben Brock Johnson.

Amory: Im Amory Sivertson. (Laughs.) Im just thinking about jokes.

Ben: Were coming to you from WBUR, Bostons NPR station.

Amory: Todays episode: the first of two parts in which we deconstruct the origins of humor. (Laughs.) Oh man, the origins of humor thats already funny to me. And we explain an unexplainable joke from the forgotten pages of the past.

Ben: Turns out, apparently, you dont have to explain the joke for Amory to find it hilarious. You are listening to Endless Thread. Jokes, Part 1: Sumer Funny, Sumer Not.

Amory: Our ancient bar joke journey started long before our road trip to Philly, which well get back to, of course.

Ben: For us and a lot of other people it started where else?

Seraina Nett: I actually found it on Reddit. On Ask Historians.

Ben: Youre a Redditor?

Seraina: Yes.

Ben: Can you tell me about your Reddit habits?

Seraina: Its usually more like academic Reddit, I think, than, sort of, generic Reddit.

Amory: Seraina Nett works at Uppsala University in Sweden, where she studies ancient Mesopotamia, including a region called Sumer and its language Sumerian.

She spends a lot of time translating Sumerian, looking for clues about early human development. Most of what she translates, though, is not exactly riveting.

Seraina: Of course, theres literature and the epic of Gilgamesh and kings telling us about their deeds. But the vast, vast majority of texts that we do deal with are essentially receipts, labor, assignments, payslips.

Ben: Ugh.

Ben: Seraina was one of several thousands of people who happened upon this joke in March on Reddit and initially on Twitter.

Amory: Thats where the account @DepthsOfWiki posted a screenshot from an unlinked, unnamed Wikipedia page. It reads like this: One of the earliest examples of bar jokes is Sumerian, and it features a dog.

Ben: So can you read it for us?

Seraina: In Sumerian?

Ben: Yeah. Lets start there.

Seraina: OK. Ill do my best. We dont really know how Sumerian was pronounced, so Ill do my best approximation.

Ben: Would love that.

Seraina: So in Sumerian it reads: ur-gir-re ec-dam-ce in-kur-ma / nij na-me igi nu-mu-un-du / ne-en jal taka-en-e-ce.

Amory: Ba-dum-ksh!

Ben: Trust me, if there were any ancient Sumerians listening to this podcast, they would be rolling on the floor right now.

Amory: No doubt. But to help out you English-speaking listeners, though, we asked Seraina to translate. And, boy, is it a doozy.

Seraina: In English, that means something like, A dog entered into a tavern and said, probably I cannot see anything. I shall open this, or this one.

Ben: Thats it. Thats the joke. A dog walks into a bar, or tavern, or something else but more on that later and the dog says, I cant see a thing. Ill open this one.

Amory: If you noticed some hesitation in Serainas voice, thats because scholars have different translations for this joke. Sumerian is the earliest written language on record, with the first examples dating to about 3000 B.C.E. And its a dead language.

Ben: Sumerian is also an isolate, meaning it isnt related to any other known language, making translation an imprecise art. Still, the joke more or less translates as Seraina said. Get it?

Amory: Neither did we. Nor did any of the dozen-plus colleagues and friends we asked over the last couple of months.

(Montage of WBUR staffers and friends.)

Saurabh: Can you say that again? A dog walks into a bar and says?

Ben: Ill open this one.

Saurabh: So there is no bar, and the dog is the bartender?

Quiana: What can a dog open? They dont have thumbs.

Marquis: What type of bar is this? What cant the dog see?

Ben: Thats actually a very astute question.

Tinku Ray: And whats the answer?

Ben: Were not sure.

Nora Saks: Im imagining a dog with a can of Budweiser and, like, using his little paws to open it. And thats mildly amusing. Thats it.

Quincy Walters: Maybe they had, like, you know, the forethought to know that this cryptic joke would last through the ages and have people on this wild goose chase. And theyre off in, you know, another realm laughing, like the joke is on us, maybe.

Ben: We knew when we started looking into this, we may indeed end up the butt of this joke because we knew we might not find the answer to what makes it funny or what it tells us about the origins of humor. But we were willing to take that chance.

Amory: So a bit of background. A lot of people point to Sumer as the first human civilization. It emerged around 5000 B.C.E. And it was made possible by the Agricultural Revolution. This was before Egypt, Greece, etc. And geographically, it was in Mesopotamia, the region in and around modern-day Iraq.

Gonzalo Rubio: The very name Mesopotamia, the Greek name, refers to the land that is in-between rivers, the Tigris to the east and the Euphrates to the west.

Ben: This is Gonzalo Rubio of Penn State. Another expert we spoke to early on our journey.

He says Mesopotamia is home to a lot of firsts.

Gonzalo: Its the cradle of bureaucracy. Its the cradle of agriculture. Its the cradle of a lot of babies, if you will.

Ben: (Laughs.)

Amory: Gonzalo and Seraina told us that, combined with new large-scale irrigation techniques, the river valleys were so fertile that this agrarian society had an enormous surplus. That made it possible to feed a lot of people maybe for the first time in humanity.

Ben: Were talking up to 1.5 million Sumerians, who in turn built some of the earliest cities with culture and taverns and social hierarchy.

Seraina: So you have the elites. Then you have, lets say, a middle class with craftspeople for example, merchants, more well-to-do people. And then you have a vast lower class of farm laborers, workers, and so forth. And also enslaved people.

Amory: The humor of the dog-in-a-bar joke was probably related to those Sumerian ways of life, perhaps the middle class or well-off, people with downtime and drinking shekels.

Ben: But while some experts know some things about Sumer, the nuances have been lost, and its the nuances that bring jokes to life.

Seraina: I must admit, I dont understand the punchline. Im not quite sure what it is.

Ben: OK.

Seraina: It could have been a pun that we dont understand. It could have been a reference, I dont know, to a local politician or some famous figure. So its very hard for us to tell.

Amory: OK, so this seemed like the first plausible theory. Jokes do often include references to current events and sayings, from Bye, Felicia! to The rent is too damn high!

Ben: So maybe a local powerful person said, Ill open this one, in some other context and became infamous for it? And this bar joke is actually just comparing him to a dumb dog? Just a guess.

Amory: There are hundreds of guesses online: Maybe the punchline was meant to be physical, unspoken. Or it could be as simple as: I cant see a thing because my eyes are closed. Not a great joke, but maybe thats all you can expect from proto-humor. Gonzalo had a different thought, though admittedly, one that felt like it would shut down our investigation before it even began.

Gonzalo: When people say this is a joke, first of all, we dont even know what it is.

Ben: I mean, it is structured like a joke. Theres a setup (dog goes into a bar, cant see anything) and a punchline (Ill open this one). But maybe thats revisionist history. Seraina didnt even refer to this as a joke when we first started talking.

See more here:
What makes the world's first bar joke funny? No one knows. - WBUR News