The World's Oldest Known Joke Is About Farts — From 1900 BC Sumer

Quick Answer

The oldest known joke is a Sumerian proverb from approximately 1900 BC that reads: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial — a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." It is essentially a fart joke about marriage, and it has survived for nearly 4,000 years on clay tablets. The second oldest known joke is an ancient Egyptian quip from about 1600 BC. Toilet humor and observations about marriage, it appears, are among the most universal and enduring forms of comedy.

The Joke Itself

The Sumerian proverb, dated to approximately 1900 BC, was found on a clay tablet and translates roughly to:

"Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap."

The humor is in the double negative and the absurdity. It is saying that a wife has always farted in her husband's lap — this is something that has happened since time began. The joke works by setting up a grand, epic framing ("since time immemorial") and then deflating it with a bodily function.

If your first reaction is "that is not very funny," you are in good company. Humor is culturally dependent, and a 4,000-year-old joke from a dead civilization was never going to land the same way it did in ancient Sumer. But the structure of the joke — the setup-and-deflation pattern, the use of bodily humor to puncture pretension — is immediately recognizable. It is the same comedic formula that drives modern observational humor.

The joke was identified as the oldest known example by a 2008 study at the University of Wolverhampton, which surveyed the oldest recorded attempts at humor across multiple ancient civilizations. The researchers noted that the Sumerian example predates the next oldest known jokes by centuries.

Why Fart Jokes?

The fact that humanity's oldest surviving joke is about flatulence might seem like a disappointment — of all the things our ancestors could have preserved, they preserved a fart joke? But this discovery actually tells us something meaningful about the universality of certain kinds of humor.

Body humor crosses every cultural boundary. Every human farts. Every human has been in a social situation where flatulence was inappropriate. The tension between a universal bodily function and social expectations of dignity creates an inherent comedic friction that does not require shared cultural knowledge to understand.

Taboo violation is a core mechanism of humor. Much of what makes something funny is the transgression of a social norm — saying or acknowledging something that is normally suppressed. Flatulence in the company of others violates norms of propriety that apparently existed in Sumer just as they do today. The joke gets its energy from naming the unspeakable.

Marriage humor is equally ancient. The joke is not just about flatulence — it is about the intimacy and loss of pretense in marriage. The young bride, who presumably maintained composure during courtship, inevitably lets her guard down in the domestic setting. This observation about the gap between romantic ideals and domestic reality is a comedy staple that has survived from Sumer through Shakespeare to modern sitcoms.

Other Ancient Jokes

The Sumerian fart joke is the oldest, but it is not the only ancient attempt at humor that has survived.

Ancient Egyptian joke (c. 1600 BC): "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish." This combines sexual humor with wordplay — a formula that has proven equally durable.

Ancient Greek joke (Philogelos, c. 4th century AD): The Philogelos ("Laughter-Lover") is the oldest known joke book, containing 265 jokes. Many involve stock characters — the absent-minded professor, the fool from a specific city, the miser. Sample: "An absent-minded professor was on a ship when a storm blew up. When his slaves began weeping in terror, he said, 'Don't worry — I have freed you all in my will.'" The structure — a character whose response to danger is absurdly inappropriate — is the ancestor of every "walks into a bar" joke.

Ancient Roman graffiti (Pompeii, before 79 AD): The walls of Pompeii are covered in jokes, insults, political commentary, and crude humor. "Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men's behinds." This was not sophisticated humor, but it was public, permanent, and apparently popular enough to carve into stone.

The pattern across these ancient sources is consistent: sex, bodily functions, death, stupidity, and the gap between pretension and reality. These are the same themes that dominate comedy today. The specific cultural references change, but the fundamental sources of human laughter have remained remarkably stable for millennia.

What Survives and What Doesn't

It is important to acknowledge that the "oldest known joke" is the oldest recorded joke — the oldest one that was written down and survived. Oral humor is certainly far older than writing itself. Our ancestors were undoubtedly telling jokes, making puns, and using humor for social bonding long before anyone thought to carve them into clay.

The Sumerian joke survived because it was recorded on a clay tablet — one of the most durable writing surfaces ever used. Clay tablets from Mesopotamia have survived floods, fires, wars, and thousands of years of burial because fired clay is nearly indestructible. Organic writing materials — papyrus, paper, bark, leather — decay. Clay endures.

This creates a bias in our record. We know more about Sumerian and Babylonian humor than about humor from cultures that used perishable writing materials, not because Mesopotamians were funnier but because their jokes survived the physical process of time. The ancient jokes we have are like fossils — the few examples that happened to be preserved, not a representative sample of what existed.

Humor as a Human Universal

The existence of humor across every known human culture, and its persistence across thousands of years of recorded history, suggests that humor is not a cultural luxury but a fundamental human trait — as basic as language, music, or the drive to form social bonds.

Evolutionary psychologists have proposed several explanations for why humor evolved. It serves as a social bonding mechanism, reducing tension within groups. It signals intelligence (humor requires understanding expectations well enough to violate them in a surprising way). It provides a safe way to explore taboo subjects and test social boundaries. It reduces stress by reframing threatening situations as non-threatening.

All of these functions are visible in the Sumerian fart joke. It bonds the teller and listener through shared recognition of an embarrassing truth. It demonstrates social awareness of propriety norms. It addresses the taboo subject of bodily functions in a safe, playful context. And it takes the potentially uncomfortable subject of marital intimacy and renders it harmless through humor.

Nearly 4,000 years later, we are still doing the same thing. The delivery has gotten more sophisticated, the cultural references have changed, and the tablets are now screens. But the fundamental impulse — to make another human laugh by naming something true that they were not expecting to hear — remains exactly what it was in ancient Sumer. We are still telling fart jokes. And apparently, we always will be.