This is great, and a wel­come respite from pol­i­tics. [Researchers have found the world’s old­est joke.](http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h_OczNQMGiWXoiyi7apguhKSQXWw)
“Some­thing which has never occurred since time immemo­r­ial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap,” goes the joke, which dates from 1900 B.C. and which orig­i­nated in what is now south­ern Iraq.

Now, I like a good fart joke as much as the next guy, but WTF? Does any­one actu­ally get that?

No mat­ter. Iraqi humor even today doesn’t quite trans­late into Eng­lish, a fact that often left me feel­ing damn con­fused over grue­some tales that my Iraqi friends found hilarious.

Many of mod­ern day Iraqi jokes deal with the Dulaimi tribe from Anbar and tend to focus on their per­ceived back­ward­ness and sheer yokelry. One I remem­bered went some­thing like, “A Dulaimi drove his cousin to Bagh­dad. His cousin sat behind the dri­ver so he could take over the wheel after he killed the first guy.” Much laugh­ter would then ensue, and no, I still don’t get it.

But the real genius of Iraqi humor was pok­ing fun at Sad­dam and mak­ing word plays. (Too bad puns don’t trans­late well.) ‘Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the sickly vice chair­man of the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Com­mand Coun­cil who today may or may not be part of the neo-Ba’athist insur­gency (what’s left of it) often came in for humil­i­at­ing jokes. The craven yes-man was often pic­tured imper­son­at­ing a woman, for some reason.

Ancient humor was no dif­fer­ent, and mega­lo­ma­ni­a­cal rulers have always been good for a laugh. Some of the ancient jokes the researchers found poked fun at Egypt­ian pharaohs.

“How do you enter­tain a bored pharaoh?” goes one. “Sail a boat­load of young women dressed only in fish­ing nets down the Nile — and urge the pharaoh to go fish­ing.“
Put your favorite Iraqi joke — not jokes *about* Iraqis, mind you — in the comments.