November 15, 2008

Fourth century greek humour. A strange flash edition of an even stranger fourth century Greek joke book called Philogelos: The Laugh Addict.

Some of the jokes are surprisingly modern, some merely humorous moments or situation gags rather oddly rendered in 'joke' form (eg. a guy tries to bait his mouse trap with meat, because he thinks meat is tasty! Rimshot!). For extra strangeness, some of the pages of the 'book' include full motion video of a 21st century comedian reading the ancient jokes in a brick-wall-background comedy club. All in all, a fascinating look at a culture at once removed and familiar to our own. With funny. Warning, ancient slavery treated as humour. Via Slashdot

posted by Dreadnought 16 years ago
  • Hehe, some of those are pretty good.
  • I take it someone else was listening to As It Happens tonight?
  • Cesar and a senator walk into the Acropolis together...
  • Jim Bowen does Ancient Greek... *boggles*
  • If his delivery was slightly different, many of these *would* actually be funny, but he reads them dryly off a piece of paper. But I never thought Bowen was actually funny, he's a typical working-men's club comic, someone who really is bereft without his tried and tested material and lines he's done hundreds of times which he delivers nightly in exactly the same way.
  • We used to get As it Happens on the radio, here, but it got replaced by some show called Fresh Air, which seems to be all about musicians you haven't listened to, books you haven't read and visual art you haven't looked at. My Americans friends seem to think this is a great improvement, because sometimes AIH has stories about Canada. Apparently, if you live in a rustbelt ghetto, 100 km from the nearest big city, other G8 countries are just hilariously provincial. So here's the thing about the Dead Parrot angle: has anybody else noticed that the two jokes are actually completely different? I suspect that if the Dead Parrot joke was translated through the Philogelos frame of reference, it would become one of those inexplicable jokes that don't translate: 'A man bought a parrot from a student dunce, but came back an hour later complaining that it was dead. "It is not dead, it just misses its northern homeland", cried the dunce. "Now I see why they call you a dunce", said the man, "this parrot was dead even before I bought it from you".' Actually, come to think of it, that's pretty funny.
  • do the student dunces pine for the fjords?