Endless Thread - Jokes, Part I: Sumer Funny, Sumer Not

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

What makes the world’s first documented bar joke funny? No one knows. In a tweet that garnered thousands of responses in March, the Twitter account @DepthsOfWiki posted about a 4,000-year-old proverb written on a clay tablet. The line, which experts believe is a joke from the ancient civilization of Sumer, starts with the set-up, “A dog walks into a tavern.” But the punchline has left scholars and online commenters scratching their heads. The joke’s meaning has been lost, and finding 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. ****** Credits: This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell. Mixing and sound design by Emily Jankowski. Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson are the co-hosts.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Let's do the jokes. Let's make some jokes.

Knock knock. Who's there? Oh, God, I didn't have anything to say after that. A few weeks ago, Amory and I hopped in my car and headed south from Boston. We had jokes on the brain, sort of. You still haven't finished your jokes. I know, I'm trying to think of any jokes I actually know, but like... In fairness, I was driving.

Mm-hmm. 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. I'm not really blonde, but I know a blonde joke. Okay, let's hear it. What do you call a blonde skin? Apparently this joke is hilarious.

I wouldn't know. That's just how I am. This joke we were looking for is not a blonde joke. It's a bar joke. History's 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.

But there's one little problem. a mystery that's been bugging scholars for decades since the joke was unearthed. This joke, it is not that funny because nobody gets it. At least, nobody's still alive. What's fuck? I don't get it. I don't get it. Maybe I'm too stupid to understand this joke.

I don't have an answer nor a laugh. I don't get it. Like, I got questions and you don't have no answers. So you got to figure it out. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Severson. I'm just thinking about jokes. We're coming to you from WBUR Boston's NBR station.

Today's episode, the first of two parts in which we deconstruct the origins of humor. Oh, man. The origins of humor. That's already funny to me. And we explain an unexplainable joke. from the forgotten pages of the past. Turns out, apparently you don't have to explain the joke for Amory to find it hilarious. You are listening to Endless Thread Jokes Part 1.

Sumer funny. Sumer not. Our ancient bar joke journey started long before our road trip to Philly, which we'll get back to, of course. For us and a lot of other people, it started where else? I actually found it on Reddit on Ask Historians. You're a redditor? Yes. Can you tell me about your Reddit habits?

So it's usually more like academic Reddit, I think, than sort of generic Reddit. Sorina Net 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. Of course, there's 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, yeah, essentially, receipts, labor assignments, pay slips. Ugh.

Yeah. Sorina was one of several thousands of people who happened upon this joke in March on Reddit. And initially, on Twitter. That's where the account definitely. of wiki posted a screenshot from an unlinked, unnamed Wikipedia page. It reads like this, quote, one of the earliest examples of bar jokes is Sumerian, and it features a dog. So can you read it for us?

In Sumerian? Yeah, let's start there. Okay, I'll do my best. We don't really know how Sumeran was pronounced, so I'll do my best approximation. Would love that. So in Sumerian it reads, Urgi Rei Eshtam's she Inkuma, Ning nam Egynumundu,

then Gail Takayneesh. Butam-cch. Trust me, if there were any ancient Sumerians listening to this podcast, they would be rolling on the floor right now. No doubt. But to help out you English-speaking listeners, though, we asked Soraina to translate. And boy, is it a doozy.

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. That's it. That's the joke. A dog walks into a bar or tavern or something else, but more on that later. And the dog says, I can't see a thing. I'll open this one. If you notice some hesitation in Sorina's voice,

that's because scholars have different translations for this joke. Sumerian is the earliest written language on record, with the first examples dating to about 3,000 BCE. And it's a dead language. Sumerian is also an isolate, meaning it isn't related to any other known language, making translation an imprecise art. Still, the joke more or less translates,

as Sorina said. Get it? Neither did we, nor did any of the dozen plus colleagues and friends we asked over the last couple months. Can you say that again? The dog walks into a bar and says, I'll open this one. So there is no bar and the dog is the bartender? What can a dog open? They don't have thumbs. I was saying, what type of bar is this? What can't the dog see? That's actually a very astute question. And what's the answer?

We're not sure. I'm imagining a dog with a can of Budweiser and using his little paws to open it, and that's mildly amazing. That's it. Maybe they had, like, you know, the forethought to know that this cryptic joke lasts through the ages and have people on this wild goose chase, and they're off in, you know, another realm laughing.

Like, the joke is on us, maybe. 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. So a bit of background. A lot of people point to Sumer as the first human civilization. It emerged around 5,000 BCE, 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.

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. 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. It's the cradle of bureaucracy. is the cradle of agriculture, is the cradle of a lot of babies, if you will.

Gonzalo and Soraina told us that, combined with the 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. We're talking up to 1.5 million Sumerians, who, in turn, built some of the earliest cities,

with culture and taverns and social hierarchy. So you have, obviously, they have the elite, then you have sort of a, yeah, let's say 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. The humor of the dog in a bar joke was probably related to those Sumerian ways of life. Perhaps the middle class are well off.

People with downtime and drinking shekels. But while some experts know some things about Sumer, the nuances have been lost, and it's the nuances that bring jokes to life. I must admit, I don't understand the punchline. I'm not quite sure what it is. Okay. It could have been a pun that we don't understand.

There could have been a reference, I don't know, to a local politician or some famous figure. So it's very hard for us to tell. Okay. So this seemed like the first plausible theory. Jokes do often include references to current events and sayings. From by Felicia to the rent is too damn high. So maybe a local, powerful person said,

I'll 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. There are hundreds of guesses online. Maybe the punchline was meant to be physical, unspoken. Or it could be as simple as, I can't see a thing because my eyes are closed. Not a great joke, but maybe that's 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. When people say this is a joke, first of all, we don't even know what it is. I mean, it is structured like a joke. There's a setup, a dog goes into a bar, can't see anything, and a punchline. I'll open this one. But maybe that's revisionist history. Sorana didn't even refer to this as a joke when we first started talking. This proverb is in no way special.

It's part of a larger collection of many, many, many proverbs. The bar joke or proverb is number 5.77 in a collection of hundreds of other proverbs about dogs, donkeys, husbands. Some read like sayings. Others like weird short stories. But jokes, depends on how you see things. Like this other proverb, Gonzalo told us. It's something like, behold, watch out,

something that never occurred since time in memorial. The young woman did not fart in her husband's lap. Sorry, I'm going to be really dumb for a second, and I'm going to say. I am too, because this is... I'm not sure I get the joke. So is the joke that the woman would never admit that she farted in her husband's lap? Or is the joke that the woman always parts in her husband's lap, and that's the joke that we're suggesting that it's never happened before?

I think the joke is precisely the latter. The joke is that it is suspected to happen. So to set up the joke by saying, watch out. This is something that has never happened, not once. And then the sentences, well, the young woman did not fart in her husband's lap. This fart joke, which Gonzalo insists, is a joke. This one gave us a little bit of hope because it's structured like the bar proverb, right? Set up punchline.

So we thought maybe we're not rewriting history. This formula has been around. And Soraina told us there are more proverbs meant to be funny. The structure is not always the same, but there is one recurring feature that makes the proverbs stand out. out as jokes. There is quite a lot of innuendo, things like sexuality or, I don't know, excrement, for example. One of my favorite ones is a bull with diarrhea leaves a long trail. This is going to be my new after my email signature quote.

A bull with diarrhea leaves a long track. Yeah. That's a good way to scare some people away from your inbox. That's how I'm going to sign all my emails. Get your email count down. There's another proverb about the enormity of elephant poop. Another compares the sex appeal of a shepherd to a gardener. One with a longer staff, the other a nicer bush.

Collectively, they struck us as a tad juvenile. It also struck us that, on its face, the bar proverb is not that juvenile. A dog walks into a tavern and says, I can't see a thing. I'll open this one. No sex, no diarrhea. so maybe it's not a joke. But then Gonzalo told us something interesting. The word for tavern, Estab, for us, it conveys the idea of a pub or a bar.

Yeah. But really, in ancient Mesopotamia, a tavern is also a place where sex trade takes place. So it's a tavern, but it's also you could translate as a brothel. A dog walks into a brothel. Depending on your perspective, word change totally alters this joke. And also, what the dog might be opening. I don't think I want to say on the record what I think. A door.

Then maybe he'll see something or somebody or someone, you know. The dog in the brothel has to be a horny dog. Like, you know the dogs that you go to their house and they just be hump in your leg? There's got to be one of them dogs. Maybe it's like a sandal or a robe. Oh, that's good. Yeah. I'll be here all day, guys. So going back to this so-called bar joke, how do you interpret it? It could be the dog walks into the bar with his eyes closed,

let me open this as the eyes, or open, I don't know, a door. There is also a word that sounds very similar to one of the words that is a word for female genitalia. See, you know what? That's what I was going to ask. that's where my head was at. Is that right? It's not a very obvious pun, so I'm not quite sure.

Right. To us, these revelations felt like the thing, the epiphany, brothels, maybe some genitalia talk. It's a dirty joke. End of story. There's another complication, though, because it still doesn't make sense,

or at least we're not laughing. Plus, the translations are too loose and feel kind of unreliable. We mentioned this to Serena, who dropped one more tantalizing clue about the clay tablet or tablets that hold our proverb. So this particular proverb is attested on two different versions of the text, and actually they're not identical. So already somebody screwed up. Okay. One of them is also a little bit broken, so it's hard to tell.

This thing that everyone's struggling to understand, no freaking wonder, because it's, there are two copies. They're actually both broken, and they don't match. So we're blasting down the highway. Amory is behind the wheel. What's doing next? I don't know. You tell me, what are you doing next? Well, I would like to get to our destination, but I don't know where to go. This brings us back to our voyage to Philadelphia, where we've arranged to see the primary documents in real life. To see these two slabs of clay, which have been in storage for years to see a joke that may be crumbled

or that may be riddled with typos or that may not be a joke at all. What we found in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bucks. Regardless of web. Whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew.

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After a six-hour drive, contemplating jokes in primeval humor, we meet our producer, Dean, at the Penn Museum in Philly. Outside, it's Grant. Red brick and white marble walls topped with a terror. caught a roof, shadowed, though, by a very 90s-looking hospital. Okay. Okay, so... Inside, it is stuffed with a whole lot of old, and I should say, quite beautiful, stuff. This footprint captures the moment over 4,000 years ago when someone stepped barefoot on a mud brick left to dry in the sun.

And they're like, oh, that's wet. We head to the Mesopotamian artifacts, where we're meeting a guy who says, show us the goods, and maybe bring us closer to figuring this whole thing out. He's not there when we arrive, so we do a little reading. At first, writing was primarily used to record the movement of goods and uses of labor under the supervision of the temple. Quickly, writing in Mesopotamia can be used to record historical events, dedications to the gods.

It's interesting to read this description and have it be like, we invented writing because people couldn't remember people couldn't stay organized. It was like... We need to remember. Oh man, where did all those like clay pots go? Ted, do you remember?

Ten minutes later, Dr. Philip Jones arrives. Do you prefer Philip or Phil? I generally go by Phil. Donning a blue beanie and a laid-back vibe. I am the... What am I? I'm the associate keeper and curator of the Babylonian section. Phil walks us to a...

display case with about a dozen sand-colored tablets ranging from the size of a coaster to the size of a tablet an iPad. Each one is covered in small impressions made by a stylus. If I'm teaching, writing on clay, I just use a chopstick. You push the corner in, it creates the sort of distinctive triangular head. Some of the script can be so tiny and fine that it's kind of miraculous and also hard to see. Other scripts, just big and sloppy. When we ask about that, Phil tells us something we didn't know when we first started reporting this story. First of all, whenever you see the words Samirian literature or Samirian mythology, you were talking about the texts on these kids' copies. There are no real adult editions of Samerian literature. So all the stuff we have

is just ancient practice writing? Actually, this is not TV, so you can't see this. It's like when Bart Simpson at the beginning of the Simpsons is writing the same thing on the chalkboard over and over. Yes. This feels like a particularly important revelation. Just about every Sumerian tablet ever recovered, including the ones with those juvenile proverbs.

They were written by juveniles, all of them, by kids training as scribes. While they're still, these proverbs were class assignments, as in, learn your Sumerian well by copying this dirty joke. Amazing. This is kind of incredible, right? Like, eight-year-old Ben may have been more interested in Latin if he were copying proverbs about turds and brothels. As enlightening as these display tablets are, though, we came looking for our proverb. and it's time to dig it out.

This is the tablet room. Ah. Oh, wow. Floor to ceiling, practically, a very skinny, a very skinny file cabinets. Oh, he just pulled out a drawer that was full of tablets. What? So this is where they live.

This tablet room is closed to the public. It's obvious why. The entire thing is like this epic library organized by what Phil calls a, higglety-pigglety, doy-decimal-like system. I pull on more random drawers making the communications person who's with us very nervous. You might make it even more higglety-piglety, Ben. Yeah, she's worried about more higgledy-piglety.

Does every single skinny drawer of this file cabinet contain tablets? Yes. Every single one. Why don't you find out? No, no. Each one of these things is, you know, a couple inches deep and several feet, wide. And the tablets inside, they smell like history, dating back to 2,900 BC. Many are damaged by time, pieces of fictions that needed to be reassembled.

Phil lets us poke around a little bit, pretending we're Indiana Jones. And then he corrals us to a long table. He puts on blue latex gloves and reaches for the lid of a shallow box. I think our proverb, the dog proverb is here, well, the dog proverb, it's a whole bunch of proverbs about dogs. So the dog and the tavern is here, and I think it's somewhere around here. This red clay tablet is the size of about two postcards. It's speckled black and misshapen, edges fragmented, fault lines through its center. Phil's blue finger shifts through the markings, covering every square centimeter. It's extremely exciting for us to look at this piece of clay together.

Exciting enough that I feel like, again, I'm making the communications person for the museum very nervous. So eventually Phil halts at the words we've been seeking. The text is so tiny and cramped that it seems like it would be utterly illegible. But it is so cool. So there's that, the proverb is that small. in this language? Yes. Wow.

Phil has two tablets with the bar proverb. The larger one, he says, was probably for practice. The other, the one we're gawking at, may have been an exam. Despite what Sorina said, Phil says they're not that different, which is a little disappointing to hear. So it's, do-do-do-do-do-do. So the Ur-Gi-Rei, so an ore is basically. a quadruped with nasty teeth.

So it can be a dog or a big cat. These two ancient tablets, he tells us, were etched around 1,700 BC. At first, this means nothing to us, really, but Phil explains. By that time, Sumer had actually been overtaken by the Babylonian Empire. The culture was pretty similar,

except that the Sumerian language had already died out. Kids at the time spoke Babylonian, also called Acadian. Only scribes continued to learn Sumerian. It was considered more dignified, kind of like learning Latin today. Knowing this, it seems now even more likely to us

that there are mistakes in the text. For instance, this is interesting, because that really is an Akkadian word. Whoops. Ignoring the random non-Sumarian word, the dog enters the taverny bravall, or bravallee tavern,

he can't see a thing, He opens this one. Only Phil says the word open is very similar to the word for clothes. I mean, not in this case. I think it obviously means to open. Well, it obviously means to open in this case because they do spell. Are you sure? Yeah.

I think I'm fairly sure because normally if they mean to close, they've ended up using a different spelling with this one. Phil assures us, don't worry about it too much. Slippery Sumerian translation is an, Inescapable fact, not just in this proverb. You kind of just jigsaw around until the true meaning comes together. But we have more questions. Namely, is this a joke?

Maybe even one that helps us understand, I don't know, the origins of humor? Are you, so your team not joke? Or you team joke? I, I'm team humorous saying. So maybe we're talking Seinfeld rather than Bob Hope. Okay. I like it. Joke?

Sure. Check. What's it mean? Again, we ask Phil. Now, as far as we know, Phil is not a redditor, but he spent some time on the thread when we sent it to him, going through the various theories. Some, he says, are more plausible than others. But he adds that everyone's missing some very important context about the dog.

The dog is a specific character type. It's a guard dog whose job is to keep the walls from the sheep. And in the Proverbs, you know, it's operating on the basis that it's a personality type that is fairly brutal and not really to be messed with. Interesting. That puts like a whole other layer on this thing. Because like I feel like I wasn't making any assumptions about. the dog other than its general doginess? I was trying to think of cartoon examples.

He's more like the dog in the Tom and Jerry cartoons and not Scooby-Doo. I was going to say, I was going to say, I think I've been picturing more of a Scooby-Doo than. Yeah, no, no. So a guard dog, gritty, tough, with a job to do. What's the dog open? A lot of the people online assume that this one, the dog opens, is a door into a room where people are physically preoccupied. Phil, though, thinks that doesn't mesh with the way other proverbs use the word this.

Finally, we get what we think is a solid explanation. I think usually in proverbs, when they say this, it refers to something you've already heard in the proverb, not to something new. So I think the idea that he's opening rooms and revealing couples in flagrante, doesn't quite go with how I would see the word this functioning. So I did wonder whether this is more the idea that letting the god in negates his use because basically he wants to see out, he's going to open the door, and so everybody else outside the tavern can now see in.

I mean, I think that's a legitimate way of looking at it. Phil covers up the old clay. we wistfully shuffle out. And at this moment, we buy his theory. Abrathal's guard dog is sitting outside the door under the bright Sumerian sun. He's scaring away unwelcome peeping tombs, but then he leaves his post.

He goes inside and his eyes aren't used to the dark, so he can't see anything. He opens the front door again, propping it to let in a little light. Now outside, all those tombs are looking in, seeing their politicians and neighbors in flagrante, as Phil said, the guard dog messed up. Get it?

We think so? Are we laughing? That's a lot of explanation for a joke. But even if we buy Phil's theory, which, given what we know about the typos and the child writers and the words that could mean X or Y, maybe we shouldn't buy it. But if we buy his theory, that still leaves the question,

why does any of this matter? Why do so many scholars, Redditors, Twitterers, tweeters? Why do we all care about figuring this joke out? As we're leaving, our producer, Dean, poses one more question. Why do you think humor is so important in a lot of these proverbs? Well, I think generally, you know,

proverbs or this kind of proverbial saying has a degree of humor, which is universal across human cultures. Humor. Human humor. Two enormous questions about early human development are, one, how did humor come about? What are its origins? And two, why do we even tell jokes? Why did we write them down in clay and stone and on paper and online?

These proverbs, this bar joke, they're the first documented examples of humor. Understanding them, scholars think, can help us understand this critical feature that is literally everywhere in our lives. And understanding that may reveal something unique about how we all came to be, how humans evolved. That is all in this joke. No joke. So our journey through the past to the origins of humor has to continue. And in the next episode, we will travel even further back, millennia, before the age of writing, before Sumer, before humans. That's coming up in part two.

Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Want early tickets to events, swag, bonus content, my blonde jokes that I can't seem to get out, even though they're not that funny guys. Picks of Ben's drinking Shuckle collection? Oh yeah, he's got that for sure. Join our email list. You'll find it at WBUR.org slash endless thread. This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell, and it's hosted by us, Amory Siebertson, and Ben Brock Johnson.

Mix and sound design by Emily Jenkowski. Our web producer is Kristen Torres. The rest of our team is Nora Sacks, Quincy Walters, Grace Tatter, and Megan Cattell. Also, major thanks to all of our friends and colleagues who gave us their best guesses at this old joke. Kelvin Brooks, Sarabdattar, Victor Hernandez, Dan Mazi, Franny Monaghan, Marquise Neal, Tinku Ray, Nora Sacks, Kweana Scott Ferguson, and Quincy Walters. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and a spouse's fart held in from time.

Oh, Dean, this is a good one. A spouse's fart held in from Time Immemorial. If you've got an untold history and unsolved mystery. a fart that you've been holding in, or just a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Email endless thread at wbUR.org. See you next episode. For more jokes, stick around for the jokes.