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bending-sickle · 1 year ago

Text

We Walk Into A Bar

so there's this post which talks about the earliest known example of a bar joke ("x walks into a bar and...") which no one knows or understands the punch line of, if it even has one, since it's a proverb.

it is followed up by selected screencaps of a (now deleted) thread wherein someone claims to have deciphered it all (with - also deleted - linguistic receipts) and figured out the pun.

with me so far?

okay let's go down a rabbit hole.

How We Found Out: https://www.tumblr.com/bending-sickle/723007901258711040

We Know Nothing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_joke

“[Assyriologist Dr. Seraina] Nett suggests that the punchline could be a pun that is incomprehensible to modern readers, or a reference to some figure who was well known at the time but similarly unfamiliar to us today. Gonzalo Rubio, another Assyriologist, cautions that this ambiguity ultimately means it is simply not possible to definitely categorize the proverb as a joke, though he and other scholars like Nett do point to the recurring use of innuendo in such proverbs as indicating that many were indeed intended to be humorous.”

We Know Nothing, Part 2: Podcast Boogaloo

“What makes the world’s first bar joke funny? No one knows.” Endless Thread podcast, August 5, 2022 https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2022/08/05/sumerian-joke-one

Hosts: Amory Siverston & Ben Brock Johnson

Guests:

Dr. Seriana Nett (Assyriologist and researcher at the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Uppsala University, Sweden)

Dr. Gonzalo Rubio (Assyriologist and Associate Professor of Classics & Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Pennsylvania State University, USA)

Dr. Philip Jones (Associate Curator and Keeper of Collections of the Babylonian section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, a.k.a. the Penn Museum, USA).

Excerpts:

Amory: Seraina Nett works at Uppsala University in Sweden, where she studies ancient Mesopotamia, including a region called Sumer and its language Sumerian. She spends a lot of time translating Sumerian, looking for clues about early human development.

[…]

Ben: Seraina was one of several thousands of people who happened upon this joke in March on Reddit and initially on Twitter.

Amory: That’s where the account @DepthsOfWiki posted a screenshot from an unlinked, unnamed Wikipedia page. It reads like this: “One of the earliest examples of bar jokes is Sumerian, and it features a dog.”

[…]

Amory: The humor of the dog-in-a-bar joke was probably related to those Sumerian ways of life, perhaps the middle class or well-off, people with downtime and drinking shekels.

Ben: But while some experts know some things about Sumer, the nuances have been lost, and it’s the nuances that bring jokes to life.

[…]

Seraina: It could have been a pun that we don’t understand. It could have been a reference, I don’t know, to a local politician or some famous figure. So it’s very hard for us to tell.

[…]

Seraina: This proverb is in no way special. It’s part of a larger collection of many, many, many proverbs.

Amory: The bar joke — or proverb — is Number 5.77 in a collection of hundreds of other proverbs about dogs, donkeys, husbands. Some read like sayings. Others like weird short stories. But jokes? Depends on how you see things. Like this other proverb Gonzalo told us:

Gonzalo: It’s something like, “Behold! Watch out! Something that has never occurred since time immemorial; the young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”

Ben: Sorry, I’m going to be really dumb for a second.

Amory: I am too because this is—

Ben: I’m not sure I get the joke. Is the joke that the woman would never admit that she farted in her husband’s lap? Or is the joke that the woman always farts in her husband’s lap? And that’s the joke, that we’re suggesting that it’s never happened before.

Gonzalo: I think the joke is precisely the latter. The joke is that it is expected to happen. To set up the joke by saying, “Watch out, this is something that has never happened, not once.” And then the sentence is, well, “The young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”

[…]

Seraina: There’s quite a lot of innuendo — things like sexuality or, I don’t know, excrement. For example, one of my favorite ones is, “A bull with diarrhea leaves a long trail.”

[…]

Gonzalo: The word for tavern, “ec-dam,” for us, it conveys the idea of a pub or a bar. But really, in ancient Mesopotamia, a tavern is also a place where sex trade takes place. So it’s a tavern, but you could also translate it as a brothel.

[…]

Seraina: It could have been the dog walks into the bar with his eyes closed; “Let me open this,” as in the eyes. Or open, I don’t know, a door. There is also a word that sounds very similar to one of the words that is a word for female genitalia.

[…]

Ben: There’s another complication, though, because it still doesn’t make sense. Or, at least, we’re not laughing. Plus, the translations are too loose and feel kind of unreliable. We mentioned this to Seraina, who dropped one more tantalizing clue about the clay tablet — or tablets that hold our proverb.

Seraina: So this particular proverb is attested on two different versions of the text. And actually, they’re not identical. So, already, somebody screwed up. One of them is also a little bit broken, so it’s hard to tell.

Amory: This thing that everyone’s struggling to understand: No fricken wonder! Because there are two copies. They’re actually both broken, and they don’t match.

[…]

Ben: These two ancient tablets, he tells us, were etched around 1700 B.C.E. At first, this means nothing to us, really, but Phil explains. By that time, Sumer had actually been overtaken by the Babylonian empire. The culture was pretty similar, except that the Sumerian language had already died out.

Amory: Kids at the time spoke Babylonian, also called Akkadian. Only scribes continued to learn Sumerian. It was considered more dignified — kind of like learning Latin today. Knowing this, it seems now even more likely to us that there are mistakes in the text. For instance:

[…]

Ben: Ignoring the random non-Sumerian word, the dog enters the taverny brothel or brothely tavern. He can’t see a thing. He opens this one. Only, Phil says the word “open” is very similar to the word for “close.”

Phil: I mean, not in this case. I think it obviously means to—. Well? It obviously means to open in this case because they do spell—

Amory: Are you sure?

Ben: Yeah, you sound unsure.

Phil: I think I’m fairly sure because normally, if they mean “to close,” they’ve ended up using a different spelling than this one.

[…]

Amory: But he [Phil] adds that everyone’s missing some very important context about the dog.

Phil: The dog is a specific character type. It’s a guard dog whose job is to keep the wolves from the sheep. And in the proverbs, you know, it’s operating on the basis that it’s a personality type that is fairly brutal and not really to be messed with.

Ben: Interesting. That puts like a whole ‘nother layer on this thing because I feel like I wasn’t making any assumptions about the dog other than its general doggyness.

[…]

Phil: I think usually in proverbs, when they say “this,” it refers to something you’ve already heard in the proverb, not to something new. So I think the idea that he’s opening rooms and revealing, you know, couples in flagrante doesn’t quite go with how I would see the word “this” functioning. So I did wonder whether this is more the idea that letting the guard in negates his use because, basically, he wants to see out, he’s going to open the door, and so everybody else outside the tavern can now see in. I mean, I think that’s a legitimate way of looking at it.

Ben: Phil covers the old clay. We wistfully shuffle out. And, at this moment, we buy his theory. A brothel’s guard dog is sitting outside the door under the bright Sumerian sun. He’s scaring away unwelcome Peeping Toms. But then he leaves his post.

Amory: He goes inside, and his eyes aren’t used to the dark, so he can’t see anything. He opens the front door again, propping it to let in a little light. Now, outside, all those Toms are looking in, seeing their politicians and neighbors in flagrante, as Phil said. The guard dog messed up. Get it?

Reddit Redux: User serainan (Seraina Nett) To The Rescue

1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tbgetc/this_bar_joke_from_ancient_sumer_has_been_making/

"We usually translate the word esh-dam as 'tavern'. Yes, they are associated with prostitution, but it is not primarily a brothel. There is eating and drinking and sex. So, the joke could be sexual, but doesn't necessarily have to be.

The verb ngal2--taka4 in its basic meaning means 'to open' without any sexual connotation. However, there's a noun gal4-la that sounds similar and means 'vulva', so there could be some double-entendre there...

Essentially, the interpretation of the proverb depends on the demonstrative 'ne-en' 'this' and what it refers to – grammatically, I'd agree with you and say it seems to refer to the eye, but there's really no way of knowing for sure.

The problem with jokes is really that they are so culture-specific. Maybe this joke makes fun of a local politician or it is using a very crude word that is not otherwise attested in our sources (written texts, particularly in ancient cultures, of course only cover a limited part of the vocabulary).

Bottom line: We don't get the joke! ;) ”

The Unknown and Deleted: A Story in Four Sources

1 - https://twitter.com/lmrwanda/status/1505648702119202823?t=IHkQWeElTa0T63o3lbr12Q&s=19

2 - https://twitter.com/lmrwanda/status/1505646738627088389?t=06aHTTZkf1ZaJyCDhWUzTg&s=19

3 - https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/subversive-walex-kaschuta-1979505/episodes/lin-manuel-rwanda-the-twilight-158022618

4 - http://im1776.com/author/lin-manuel

There was one person on Twitter claiming the joke was, “A friendly dog walks into a bar. His eyes do not see anything. He should open them.” Or “He should crack one open.” (1) They add “It’s a ‘man walks into a bar and hurts his head’ tier dad joke, basically. The ‘pun’ in Sumerian is centered on the fact that the verb ‘to see’ also literally means ‘open (one’s) eye’.” This was at the end of a long word-by-word translation thread (which I can’t judge the quality of, and no other experts were chiming in) dated March 20, 2022 (2). I did not save the thread and Twitter is saying the page doesn’t exist anymore, so that’s a dead end now.

I hesitate to trust this source because I can’t find any of their qualifications (are they an assyriologist? A linguist? A candlestick maker?) and other experts in the field do not seem aware of this (if true) ground-breaking cracking of the highly-debated pun. (Dr. Seraina Nett’s gave an interview five months after this thread was made, and still called the actual pun a mystery.) I could only find out that their Twitter name is “Lin-Manuel Rwanda, @lmrwanda, Epistemic trespasser” and that, according to the podcast Subversive w/ Alex Kaschuta (December 14, 2022) (3), they are “a Twitter poster” with essays on the online magazine IM-1776, where they are credited as “Lin Manuel” (4). (Their introduction in the podcast also reveals they are a British national and resident, but the host is very coy about revealing even that. Lin Manuel corrects them, adding that they are “half Rwandan”, which explains the Twitter name. I am not listening to the whole hour and a half to look for more clues.)

#hey kids wanna learn about an obscure joke #you can see why i can't put this in a fanfic footnote #and putting it in an appendix is just...insane #anyway this has been eating my brain for a while #randomness #and now you know #a dog walks into a bar #linguistics

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