SO WHAT did the first Assyrian say to the second Assyrian?
We don’t know for sure but it definitely involved farting, according to a 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian document, the earliest known example of a joke.
Humour is a universal constant, with all societies around the world using humour as something of a social glue.
While the object is always to make others laugh, there were evolutionary benefits with the jokester more likely to attract a female with his sharp wit and also a coterie of male friends happy to bask in the comedian’s reflected glory.
The social import of humour came up for discussion yesterday in Turin at the EuroScience Open Forum, which closes later today.
Experts including an anthropologist, a linguist and a neurologist took to the podium to talk about humour and why it seems to be so very important to humans.
The oldest known example of humour came out of Assyria – in a 4,000-year-old document, said Prof Salvatore Attardo of Texas AM University. It wasn’t very funny, playing on the fact that someone had farted, but that represents humour for some.
Then there is a less than rib-tickling example available in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Basically it showed a crowd of people unable to get through a locked door because the guard minding it had got drunk and fallen asleep.
Not one likely to make it on to Comedy Central.
There are a number of Egyptian-era examples, Prof Attardo said. “They are like Dilbert cartoons,” he remarked, a reference to the US cartoon strip featuring a hapless engineer geek.
“Wherever we have historical records we have humour,” Prof Attardo said.
This is true even for the 800- year-old Book of Kells, which features comic animals occasionally added like graffiti to the margins by bored monk scribes.
Not everyone agrees about what is funny and tastes differ, but absolutely every society around the world, including the sometimes maligned as humourless Swedes, has humour.
“All people in all places have humour,” said anthropologist Dr Tom Flamson of UCLA. “There must be a good reason for having that.”
The good reason it seems is most likely evolution. Having a sharp mind able to crack a good joke displays mental fitness, a valuable trait when looking for a prospective mate, Dr Flamson said.
Other males with a similar taste in humour were also likely to want to hang with you, happy to bask in your reflected glory, but also giving the comic a higher standing among the wider group.
This isn’t all just speculation.
Stanford’s Prof Allan Reiss described brain-scan studies that showed that women reacted more strongly to humour than men. Interestingly, the part of the brain that responded is a known centre for our emotional response to reward.