Berço da Piada Ocidental

Já que muita gente diz que a arqueologia não é uma ciência séria mesmo...Vamos escavar piadas!! Já haviam descoberto a piada mais velha do mundo, que, por sinal, é bem sem graça. Agora sabemos que a piada foi aprimorada na Grécia!!

Há estudos que buscam demonstrar que as piadas gregas eram muito teóricas e foram os Romanos que deram às piadas o formato que têm hoje. Depois os bizantinos as compilaram, os alemães as comentaram. Passados séculos, com o desenvolvimento do Estado Moderno, com mudanças muito velozes, a sociedade abandonou a idéia de piadas naturais e concluiu que as piadas são uma construção humana. Esse raciocínio evoluiu para a teoria pura da piada, que hoje em dia...
Não, espera, isso foi o Direito... eu confundo sempre os dois...

Bizarre News offered by
A Dead Parrot
The old man from scene 24

From BBC
Thursday, 13 November 2008
Dead Parrot sketch ancestor found
An ancestor of Monty Python's famous Dead Parrot comedy sketch (for those of you who have never seen it, take a look at the end of this post)has been found in a joke book dating back to Greece in the 4th Century.

Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, which has been translated from Greek manuscripts, contains a joke where a man complains that a slave he was sold had died. "When he was with me, he never did any such thing!" is the reply.

In the Python sketch, written 1,600 years later, the shopkeeper claims the dead parrot is "pining for the fjords".

The 265 jokes in Philogelos are attributed to a pair of jokers called Hierocles and Philagrius, about whom very little is known.

Similar themes

Their manuscripts have been published into a multimedia online e-book, which features video of veteran comic Jim Bowen bringing the old jokes back to life in front of a 21st Century audience.
Some of the jokes are strikingly similar to modern ones, with subjects including farts, sex, ugly wives and a dimwit referred to as "a student dunce".

"One or two of them are jokes I've seen in people's acts nowadays, slightly updated," said Bowen. "They put in a motor car instead of a chariot - some of them are Tommy Cooper-esque," he added.

Some jokes are likely to baffle modern audiences, however - especially the ones about lettuce, which only make sense if you share the ancient superstition that the vegetable is an aphrodisiac.

The book has been translated by William Berg, an American professor of Classics. "The text of Philogelos comes to us from several manuscripts ranging from the 11th to the 15th Centuries," Berg said. "All of them trace back to an earlier original, probably - judging from the content and language - from the 4th Century."

Other jokes in the book include:

• Someone needled a well-known wit: "I had your wife, without paying a penny". He replied: "It's my duty as a husband to couple with such a monstrosity. What made you do it?"

• An Abderite sees a eunuch talking with a woman and asks him if she's his wife. The guy responds that a eunuch is unable to have a wife. "Ah, so she's your daughter? "

• A misogynist is attending to the burial of his wife, who has just died, when someone asks: "Who is it who rests in peace here?". He answers: "Me, now that I'm rid of her!"

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Para quem nunca viu, the dead parrot sketch: