If you think you've heard too many old jokes about airline food, imagine how many times people have heard jokes that have been around for thousands of years. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner might have us believe that the 2000 Year Old Man invented comedy.

The ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes supposedly wrote:

“These impossible women! How they do get around us! The poet was right: Can't live with them, or without them.”


Greek literature also has references to anvils falling on people's heads and men getting hit below the belt, always surefire means to get an uncomfortable laugh.


Someone named Philogelos (which means "the laughter lover") in the 4th or 5th century compiled a joke book that had all kinds of off-color gags. There are lots of cracks about women and intellectuals, like this:

When an intellectual was told by someone, "Your beard is now coming in," he went to the rear entrance and waited for it. Another intellectual asked what he was doing. Once he heard the whole story, he said: "I'm not surprised that people say we lack common sense. How do you know that it's not coming in by the other gate?"


Students at the Memorial University of Newfoundland compiled jokes from the Renaissance, circa 1638. This stuff is not modern hilarity either -- and they sure spelled funny back then -- but you can imagine this idea being used on a sitcom:

A Scholler that chanc'd in the night time to bee lockt out of their Colledge gates, wherfore hee knockt and a friend of his that heard it, came to the gates, of whom hee desired that hee would goe to the head of the house to get the keyes, he being within side answered him that he were best to goe him selfe for hee feared he should not prevaile.

WAZ UP DOC?????

http://jokes.wetpaint.com/page/School+jokes For all your School joke needs

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