'That is that it can be too benign and too boring, like a child's knock-knock joke. 'It explains the two ways a joke can fail,' adds McGraw. The purpose of a benign violation is to elicit laughter and disgust at the same time – which perhaps explains why crude subject matter features so commonly. McGraw says that effective jokes are a 'benign violation' always walking a delicate balancing act between too soft and too extreme. There is less risk of being dispatched by an angry monarch these days, but reading the room is still an important skill for a comedian. It was a close shave for the men, as 'if they hadn't come up with such a witty reply, their fate would have been dire indeed', says Bayless. Clearly disaster was about to befall the men, but then one of them answered: 'We might have said those things, but that was nothing to what we were going to say if the wine hadn't run out!'' 'Two men had been ridiculing the king at a drunken feast – the king was furious and summoned the men. Bayless recounts a story where a joke fell foul of English king Richard I. Jokes in the times of all-powerful medieval monarchs were a risky business. Even in a culture where only academic and religious elites could read and write, early Church scholars were busy entertaining each other with smutty comments. In other cultures, it might mean 'Thank you, that was a wonderful meal'.'īayless has found that many of the oldest written jokes were scribbled in the margins of ornate early Latin Bibles. If your child does it, you might laugh because they don't know any better. 'In some cultures, to belch at the table is highly offensive.

'Even something like belching has a cultural element,' he says. Peter McGraw, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, explains that cultural norms vary so widely, finding a universally funny joke is challenging. However, captive animals could be copying behaviours they have seen in us.īut not all rude jokes translate well across cultures. Some scholars point to the existence of teasing-like behaviours in primates like chimpanzees as evidence of an early evolutionary origin of humour in humans.

Perhaps our ability to make light of bad situations helped us to overcome them – by joining together in laughter, we were able to reinforce our social bonds. Some researchers suggest that because humour brings us together it might have an evolutionary purpose. I'll spare you the details, as it is a little rude by today's standards, but it involved seeking the advice of a sex worker. The other man ponders the question before coming up with a solution. 'Which is more fun, defecating or having sex?' This is how it starts in its 1,000-year-old format: Two men were walking along a road talking of this and that. The joke lives up to the 'truly tasteless' promise of the book. She was surprised to find, almost word for word, a joke that she had been transcribing just a day earlier. Shortly after, while waiting for her train, Bayless was reading a copy of Truly Tasteless Jokes 3 – a popular joke anthology from 1983. Few had ever been translated into English before, yet many were still funny – and some even made her laugh out loud. She was looking at some of the earliest jokes written in Latin by Catholic scholars (some in excess of 1,000 years old). After months spent poring over medieval texts for her PhD, Martha Bayless made a surprising discovery.

You are trying to prank me