Ancient Humor: Raunch, Riddles and Religion

March 25, 2008 -- In the ancient Greek poem "The Odyssey," the story's hero, Odysseus, tells the Cyclops that his name is "Nobody." When Odysseus instructs his men to drive a fiery iron spit into the monster's single eye, the Cyclops yells out in vain, "Friends, Nobody is killing me now," so no one comes to help.

This action-adventure humor, dating to around 800 B.C., is one of the first recorded jokes, according to the classics scholar Owen Ewald, who recently presented his findings on "Humor in the Ancient World" at Seattle Pacific University.

The world's first one-liners, however, were likely delivered tens of thousands of years before Homer, author of "The Odyssey," was born.

The Earliest Evidence for Humor

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anthropologists Louis Schulze and Charles Chewings became the first outsiders to record contact with Australian aboriginals, who had been genetically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world for at least 35,000 years. They witnessed evidence of a comedic tradition that could date as far back, according to Joseph Polimeni, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Manitoba.

Polimeni recently authored a paper on the evolutionary origins of humor, published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.

Schulze and Chewings got caught in a terrifying thunderstorm they thought would scare the Australians. Instead, as they later wrote: "When the thunder rends the air in deafening claps...the natives show no fear. On the contrary, they will converse freely, make light of it, and even burst out laughing at an unusually loud or peculiar clap of thunder."

The ability to be amused by life's inevitable surprises goes back at least 35,000 years, Polimeni said, citing the isolated Australians' genetic capacity for humor.

"Since archaeologists believe that modern Homo sapiens date to 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, it's actually not a very provocative statement," he added. "In fact, humor is probably at least as old as that."

The Co-Evolution of Humor and Spirituality

The 35,000-year-ago mark is significant because many milestones in human evolution began to surface at that point. Polimeni thinks people were beginning to develop the brainpower for more abstract thinking. One of the earliest symbolic pieces of art, a figurine with the head of a lion and the legs of a person, dates to this period.

Evidence for the earliest spirituality also dates to the same era, through archaeological depictions resembling contemporary shamanistic art, Polimeni said. Zombies -- still a comedic B-movie favorite --represent the sort of early beliefs that mixed spirituality with the contradictions that often form the basis of humor.

"A zombie, a spiritual concept in many hunting and gathering societies, is a person who is dead," explained Polimeni. "Being both dead and an active person is a contradiction...a violation, a concept reflecting opposite positions," qualities present in many a joke.

Polimeni theorizes that humor and spirituality emerged together, perhaps as ways for humans to relieve stress, communicate and make social connections in lieu of grooming, roughhousing and other, more direct means used by our primate ancestors.

"Given that the basis of humor may conceivably be rooted in the same cognitive machinery that allows animals to play and tease, it is certainly possible that the cognitive processes that allow spirituality may have piggy-backed on this humor cognitive substructure," he said.