TIL the UK’s oldest joke is a crude riddle that features in the Exeter Codex and dates back to the 10th Century AD - What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked bef...

L4sBot@lemmy.world · 1 year ago

TIL the UK’s oldest joke is a crude riddle that features in the Exeter Codex and dates back to the 10th Century AD - What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked bef...

LegalAction@lemmy.world · 1 year ago

That’s surely not true for a number of reasons. The UK wasn’t a thing, and modern English wasn’t a thing. Beowulf has a fair bit of jokes in it, and that’s some 200 years earlier, in Old English, than this thing.

Hell, I’m pretty sure Plato’s Symposium starts out with a three word pun. That’s Greek and not English of course, but the idea of picking out an earliest joke is just ridiculous.

TIL the UK’s oldest joke is a crude riddle that features in the Exeter Codex and dates back to the 10th Century AD - What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked bef...

TIL the UK’s oldest joke is a crude riddle that features in the Exeter Codex and dates back to the 10th Century AD - What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked bef...

August 2008 | The world's ten oldest jokes revealed - University of Wolverhampton