For anyone else wanting to know more about 3000+ year old humor, please check out Irving Finkel on YouTube. He’s hilarious, intelligent, spunky and keeps his talks interesting. I can kill an hour listening to him before I realize it.
They used to give us drivel made-up stories like this at church. Feed a beggar who comes to your house, and later you find out it was Jesus and now you’re eternally blessed. 🫤 yeah that seems sweet and all but I clearly remember one instance when one of our naive church members fell for something like this in the real world and the beggar turned out to be a scam artist.
And that’s why we modern jaded people don’t do nice things for others anymore.
But if it was a literal dog on the road? sure :-) dogs aren’t commonly as manipulative and scoundrely as humans can be.
If we cut out the context of that anecdote we get something resembling those weird recovered Sumerian jokes.
For anyone else wanting to know more about 3000+ year old humor, please check out Irving Finkel on YouTube. He’s hilarious, intelligent, spunky and keeps his talks interesting. I can kill an hour listening to him before I realize it.
One example: https://youtu.be/hDA6oIiQS4E
Just came back to say thanks for this link. Fairly sure I’m heading down a deep rabbit hole.
Also, ancient humor doesn’t seem to have had much subtlety, but some of the ideas are timeless -
"An envious landlord sees how happy his tenants are.
So he evicts them all."
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/538490/worlds-oldest-jokebook
They used to give us drivel made-up stories like this at church. Feed a beggar who comes to your house, and later you find out it was Jesus and now you’re eternally blessed. 🫤 yeah that seems sweet and all but I clearly remember one instance when one of our naive church members fell for something like this in the real world and the beggar turned out to be a scam artist.
And that’s why we modern jaded people don’t do nice things for others anymore.
But if it was a literal dog on the road? sure :-) dogs aren’t commonly as manipulative and scoundrely as humans can be.