I just came across this on social media. It’s reputedly the first bar joke. From a tablet, written in Sumerian
Except nobody really gets it. Did the comedian just miss the mark, or is there some ancient Sumerian double entendre at play?
What’s your idea? How can we interpret this to make it funny?
His eyes are shut?
I wonder if there’s some Sumerian wordplay that is lost because we don’t know the exact pronunciation. Maybe something in there has a homophone that we can’t know but that makes the joke work.
Of course, we’re probably also losing something in translation. Does the word translated as “see” actually mean “see”, or more like “sense” (and so might encompass hearing or scent)? What does “open” mean-- Could it, in this context, include lighting a lamp?
Ok, weak sauce, but here’s my take:
Dog is slang for a young guy looking to meet women. Also, your penis is referred to as your “third eye”. So, the joke is that a guy who’s looking to meet women comes into the bar and “complains” that he can’t see so he has an excuse to pull out his penis.
Lame, I know, but that’s what I came up with.
How about something akin to:
They all look the same to me. I’ll open this one at random. What could possibly go wrong?
Of course everyone, ancient Sumerian or modern Westerner, can predict that something major will go wrong.
Too soon.
Hm, that one has potential. Would a Sumerian bar have had individually-packaged drinks (as opposed to one big keg, or the like)?
I’m assuming the “something” is either a gag gift or a bar snack. Packaged liquids are still millenia in the future to those folks.
IOW, not only unavailable but inconceivable.
Well, obviously not a can or a glass bottle, but maybe a clay jug or the like.
Now THAT’s funny.
In the WBUR article, Dr. Gonzalo Rubio from Penn State suggested that the word for “bar” could mean tavern but also “a place for sex trade.” His point was that it also could be “a dog walks into a brothel.”
I once had a dream that I spoke to an ancient Sumerian about this joke. They said it was a reference to the (then common) belief that dogs won’t poop in the dark. They also said it’s funnier in the original Sumerian, but also it’s not a particularly good example of their culture’s humor.
Absent any actual ancient Sumerians to ask, I present this as the closest we’ll ever get to an explanation.
What did the man say when he walked into the bar?
“Ouch!”
Two men walk into a bar.
You think the second one would have ducked.
Hey wait! A duck walked into a bar …
I’m gonna work on it.
Mebbe, “I cannot see a thing. I’ll open one eye.” ???
Wikipedia has the translation from the first person that translated it:
An explanation for the joke is offered in the OP’s article:
Or, if it’s a bar acting as a brothel, it could be that the dog enters the bar, but there’s no-one actually in the bar, so he opens a door to reveal what is going on behind closed doors.
So it’s an early version of a Far Side comic?
You really had to be there.
See, there’s this cute little bar on the south side of Ur (take a left at the 25th century BCE), where they have a ten-for-one Happy Hour, starting when the shadow of the stick touches the rock, until you can’t see the stick.
Well, these Ammonites are playing cards, a heated game of Go Rat, and the Sumerians decide to start telling purposely bad jokes, louder and louder so the jerks will leave, and we only found out later that Chucko of Eridu carved one of the silliest ones for posterity. The funniest part is that centuries later, people are trying to figure out the stupid Bar Dog Joke.
LOL!
I note that in Biblical Hebrew, from the same general region a millennium or so later, “dog” has a secondary meaning of “male prostitute”.
So, if dog means hooker of either sex, then maybe some guy’s robe is the “this one” that’s being randomly opened.