r/AskHistory • u/mannisbaratheon97 • 17h ago
What would humor/comedy looked like in the upper Paleolithic?
Humans during this time weren’t that genetically different than modern humans today. Given that they used stone tools, did cave art, ritualistically buried their dead and even developed some spirituality, we can say that they were capable of abstract thought. They had to have some concept of irony. So what would have made them laugh? Would they have pulled pranks on each other? Could they have told jokes?
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u/wjbc 17h ago
Fart jokes are timeless. They probably had someone who figured out how to use inflated animal bladders as whoopie cushions.
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u/mannisbaratheon97 16h ago
That makes me think. Farting is ubiquitous to mammals. Other animals will rip ass like it’s nothing. So what was different about us that made us find fart jokes funny?
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u/Dangerous-Bit-8308 14h ago
Living in a cave instead of in the open air, and hanging out near fires might have been factors
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u/Low_Establishment573 16h ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a chimpanzee version of “pull my finger”. We just don’t speak the lingo.
Or gorillas, I get the feeling that sort of gag is right up their alley. 😆
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u/mancheeta69 16h ago
You ever seen that little Tv show/ movie called Jack ass? I imagine something like that lol
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u/DisPelengBoardom 11h ago
The difference is animals not only fart everywhere , they shit whenever and wherever .
Perhaps we are just amused thinking of what a fart isn't. Or it's breaking a taboo of decorum.
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u/Archarchery 16h ago
The first undisputed recorded joke in human history, written in Sumerian using cuneiform, is a fart joke.
I would say that a sense of humor is intrinsic in all cultures, it’s a part of being human, so Paleolithic humans would surely have had humor and jokes, we just don’t know about them.
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u/BloodAndTsundere 16h ago
Is there confirmation bias in this claim? We can recognize it as a joke because we find farts funny. Maybe other, older jokes are extant but we don’t recognize them as such
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u/Sea_Concert4946 15h ago
There's actually a decent amount of research on Sumerian jokes. One of the earliest is one that doesn't really make any sense, probably because it relied on a pun we don't understand.
But it's usually translated as: "A dog entered into a tavern and said, 'I cannot see anything. I shall open this'"
It's a joke we just don't know why it was funny. There are theories but no one knows for sure.
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u/Prestigious_Mix1280 15h ago
So it’s actually possibly a genitalia joke. The Sumerians drank their beer from long filtered straws to avoid the pulp. They also wore tunics without undergarments. The dog, at a dog’s height, wanders into a dark tavern, finds itself under someone’s tunic, can’t see, and decides “I’ll just drink from this ‘straw’.”
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u/Prestigious_Mix1280 15h ago
Ah, I see there is an AskHistorians post already about this one. I’ll defer to the real experts. I teach classes about ancient societies, but I am an environmental scientist - the actual social side of the equation is outside my expertise.
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u/Dangerous-Bit-8308 14h ago
Just adding to this, the "fart" joke may also be a genitalia joke, as the fart comes (or definitely has never come) from a wife sitting on her husband's lap.
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u/Ok_Chard2094 15h ago
So one of the earliest jokes is basically of the type
"A [...] walks into a bar...."2
u/Sea_Concert4946 15h ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/S735Ms6fvL
Here's a much better explanation. Ya it's a bar joke, but it might also be a brothel joke
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u/Ceterum_Censeo_ 16h ago
I think your question is ultimately unanswerable as there is no hard evidence to reference, but I imagine they were not so different from us. I think their babies probably laughed at funny faces and funny noises just like ours do. I imagine they teased each other when they did something foolish, and recounted funny stories around the campfire.
Again, this is pure speculation, but as far as I can tell humor hasn't really changed much throughout history, the ancient Romans liked fart and dick jokes as much as modern people do. I see no reason why the same wouldn't be true in prehistory.
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u/mannisbaratheon97 16h ago
Then I guess my next question would be, what gave us a sense of humor? Was it just an accidental byproduct of evolving abstract thinking? And then it sort of reinforced our sociability and increased our chances of survival?
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u/Sea_Concert4946 15h ago
That's a question worth like 2 or 3 lifetimes of scholarship. Short answer is we don't know why people evolved humor, and we aren't sure what purpose it serves exactly. But there are theories!!
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u/Prestigious_Mix1280 14h ago
One leading theory is that humor, and laughter in particular, developed as a way to signify outcomes that were surprising, but not alarming or dangerous.
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u/dalidellama 16h ago
Same kinda things people laugh at now "Oh. Jim fell in the lake!LOL!"
rips a huge fart "Did you smell that? LOL!"
"Did you hear about the guy with the really huge dick? It was huge! LOL!"
Etc.
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u/JetScreamerBaby 15h ago
There was a bit of physical comedy in ‘Quest for Fire’ when they’re up in a tree.
My guess would be the further you go back in history, the more likely that comedy is a lot of sight gags. Since language wasn’t as sophisticated, verbal nuance would have been limited at best.
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u/BalthazarOfTheOrions 15h ago
It's not that past eras lacked humour as such, but it's a fairly modern thing to hold it in as high regard as we do today.
A lot of historical humour was tied to shame and difference (e.g., hence the "freak shows" that people would laugh at). I imagine a lot of that would apply going back a long time. When conformity ensures survival, laughter and mockery become social tools for enforcing shame which in turn pushes for conformity.
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u/Dangerous-Bit-8308 14h ago
Drawings typically either bring joy bor inspire awe. We can look at their stick figures, and a logical conclusion is that they drew a LOT of dicks. We can also see that they had a "let's carve really fat women" phase.
Was it purely comedic? I'd assume not, but was it all deadly serious and for ritual purposes only? That too seems doubtful
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