IF YOU SMELT IT YOU DEALT IT

     If you Google it, the oldest recorded joke was told in 1900 BCE. It was written on a Sumerian tablet. We will have to trust the experts on this because I wasn't there to download it. And you know how unreliable those Sumerian tablets can be. The subject of the joke was a woman sitting in her husband's lap--- and farting. Let us pause here for a moment to consider how you tell a joke by scratching glyphs onto a clay tablet. About farting, fachrissakes. We also might consider how those glyphs were translated from a language spoken nearly 4000 years ago. I wonder if the grandpa joke about "pull my finger" had been common in those days. And how was it recorded?

     Using that same time frame, let us try another joke that may have been told in that time but was too long to scratch onto a tablet. A sumerian charioteer returns from a long campaign against Persia, or some other warring nation. In the time he had been away, his hut had developed a crack in the roof that allowed rain to soak into the jar holding his barley. Food was hard to aquire in those days and our charioteer found much of his stored grain, now a liquid mess. So he poured the barley water into a flagon and sat the barley out in the sun to dry. The liquid had a pleasant taste and tickled his tastebuds.  After a couple more drinks he hitched up his chariot and drove over to his neighbors hut to share this new beverage. They drank a few and a pleasant feeling suffused them with the spirit of commaraderie, and the urge  to pee. He then leaped on to his chariott.--

           "Hold my flagon of fermented barleywater Mustafa, and watch this"

Those dear friends were the last words of the Sumerian charioteer.

    All of us tell jokes. Few of us are good at it. I am not a humorist by trade so we can dispute my qualifications, but I'm going to try to explain the basics, at least what Republicans get hilariously wrong. As I write this, Representative Nancy Mace is being portrayed, and laughed at, wearing a Scarlett letter A on her white t-shirt. The letter represents, according to her, the Scarlett Letter which is to signifiy her persecution for being one of eight representatives who voted to oust the Speaker of the House,  Kevin McCarthy. An important leadership position which unti recently remained unfilled, it is as yet unfulfilled. Most of us, except obviously Nancy Mace, would remember the Scarlett Letter, written in the 19th century  by Nathanial Hawthorne. It takes place in Puritan Massachusetts, and opens with its protagonist, Hester Prynne being pelted with rotten fruit as punishment for adultery, resulting in a baby out of wedlock. She is punished for not revealing the father of the baby, a reverend by the name of Dimmesdale. As you can see Representative Grace's persecution is not anywhere close to Hester Prynne. There are however stiff-backed Christian zealots, preachers who groom, and harsh criminal punishments present in today's Republican party that were the subject of literary works of the 19th century. Probably even in the time of our Sumerian jokester. Funny how Republicans can never detect the punchline on themselves. I don't know how this confusion occurred to Rep. Mace. She seems to have a competant higher education and had a successful career in television news. Clearly this joke fell flat. Like the ancient fart, it may linger for an uncomfortably long time. Thank you. 

     Someone from my distant memory, maybe Mel Brooks, said that humor must comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. It was taken from a a bartender character  named Dooley in a book by the humorist Finley Peter Dunne. It was delivered over the bartop to a reporter and was in reference to the job of a newspaper, a news source in rare display these days. Republicans it can be presumed don't get it. Perhaps because they have their own ideas about the news not being uncomfortable to them, or maybe because they don't understand that if the joke is turned around, it ain't funny. To oppress the already oppressed is sadistic, though commonly on display by Republicans. To comfort the already comfortable is the province of the sycophant, also a subject the GOP rather opulently displays. I grew up in the prime of televised comedy. As a wee lad I loved sitting next to dad watching Jack Benny, Bob Hope, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Milton Berle and other comedy veterans. Most of that humor is ancient to today's comedy consumer, funny, but dated. Jack Benny has one set-up that is coming into a new life. His man-servant, Rochester, was always accusing him of being tight-fisted. The proof is a 1917 Maxwell electric car Benny drove, in the 1950s when gas was plentiful and cheap. Rochester, by the way was one of the few black actors with a regular gig in that day, and he had the best gag lines. Later, as I was growing into my teens, I liked watching Mort Saul, Tom Lehrer with his song parodies, and the Smothers Brothers. The humor category that they represented was topical humor, a polite way of telling jokes about how politicians don't get it. Hypocrisy was one of those elements the don'tget. This was a time, long ago when humorists lived long and productive lives, and their subject matter, the politicians, were laughing along with them for nearly as long, until they were brought down by a stripper in a fountain, or a young girl or boy that does more than serve as an aide. There was a guy who had a short comedic career, Vaughn Meador. He did spot-on voice jokes of JFK, but his material got assassinated. I was too young for Lenny Bruce, but in my 20s met a dwarf comic who had a collection of Lenny Bruce LPs. I also enjoyed the comedy LPs of Firesign Theater, a San Francisco comedy group. One of Mark Twains famous stories is, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. It is a "shaggy dog story". I've always wondered if it was called that as Mark Twain was writing it. A shaggy dog story has a long set-up which then drops the listener in a place not anticipated, and rather silly. You could not carve that into a clay tablet, or even write it on papyrus. 

     These are the comics I like best. It would be simplistic to say that the political joke writes itself, especially with todays Republican party, because there is an entire industry of comedy writers who hope some day to be a comic. With their name on the marquee, or the whiteboard in an underground club in Brooklyn. In the old days, everybody in politics was the subject of comedy. Something happened to the republican party that they seem unwittingly to volunteer to be the punchline. In this case punchline has a broader appeal, but most of us still see it as metaphor. And those who don't aren't funny. That brings up another punchline, the people who blindly follow the examples of Nancy Mace, MTG, Lauren Boeburt, and basically every Republican. In their extremity, and clearly they have moved the boundary of extreme, we can laugh at the antics of Q-Anon getting their cues from Q-level intelligence. From the intelligence agency's. Intelligence! I can't even write seriously about these comedians.

     It is said that the Court Jester, The Fool, was the only one who could speak the truth to the King. No member of the aristocracy would try it. And so began the stand up comedian. Presumably it was a pretty safe gig, sort of like being the Court Musician. This worked well for a while we assume, because there are few instances in history of the Fool meeting a violent death. Until that day came. There was a King who had no sense of humor. He told Pollock jokes or blonde jokes, or other stale material, and he did not like King jokes. His fool had his head placed on a pike and humor in the kingdom was practiced in out of the way places, stables, blacksmith shops, most assuredly in the basement where beer was stored. I wonder what kind of jokes Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito tell at Bohemian Grove where they are addressed simply as Clancy and Sam.