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The birth of comedy

There’s nothing new under the sun, especially in the hackneyed world of comedy. As the BBC reports, a book containing jokes that date back to the 4th century BC riffs on such shopworn topics as “farts, sex, ugly wives and a dimwit referred to as ‘a student dunce.’” More surprisingly, the book, which is available in e-book format with embedded multimedia, also includes an early version of Monty Python’s famous dead parrot sketch.

Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, which has been translated from Greek manuscripts, contains a joke where a man complains that a slave he was sold had died.

“When he was with me, he never did any such thing!” is the reply.

Not all of the jokes are quite so hilarious, it would seem:

Some jokes are likely to baffle modern audiences, however – especially the ones about lettuce, which only make sense if you share the ancient superstition that the vegetable is an aphrodisiac.

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