I think this is it. Fart jokes are universally considered funny by 50% of the human race.
These both seem like good choices, with the possible exception that the first one might whiff with people who dwell in extremely dry clients… not sure if anyone has lived somewhere so dry that the concept of peeing into a stream/lake wouldn’t be familiar to them.
I think funny is funny, and people in other cultures/times are/were not somehow mentally deficient in that they can/could only understand physical humor or jokes demeaning someone. One general form of humor consists of conjoining the unexpected with the expected; in other words, we laugh because we were expecting one thing and a much different thing was presented. So I think people in virtually all cultures would get the chicken crossing the road joke, at least if it was phrased with an animal they were familiar with and a place such as a road, stream, clearing which they understood. The idea is that we think the chicken has some non-obvious purpose, while the answer is that it’s the obvious reason, stupid (as in, it’s the economy, stupid). (I am not calling you stupid here, I am calling the person in the chicken joke stupid.) It’s like when someone asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, and he said because that’s where the money is.
Somebody gets it! Ludovic, Thank you for humoring me 
My first thought was: I don’t know the specific joke, but I bet it has to do with a Mother-in-law. OBviously the “In-law” aprt chanegs, but “annoying Mother of my mate” has got to be a universally recognizable problem. Not everybody has one, but everybody knows about them.
Person 1: Look at that dead bird!
Person 2: looks up Where?
YMMV with penis jokes per society. I think in Ancient Greece a large penis was considered comical (low status), not sexy, aesthetically pleasing or high status. Saying that about yourself would’ve been self-deprecating then, so a different kind of funny. Still funny though
Any interaction between an educated city boy and a rustic. These gems, though ancient, all came from Michelle Shocked’s Arkansas Traveler:
Traveler: Hey Farmer! You said the water wasn’t deep!
Farmer: It only comes up to here on the duck.
Traveler: Hey Farmer! How can I get back to the road?
Farmer: Go back the way you came from.
Traveler: Hey Farmer! You’re not very smart are you?
Farmer: No, but I ain’t lost.
Traveler: Hey Farmer! Why don’t you fix your roof?
Farmer: When it’s raining, it’s too wet to fix it and when it’s not raining, it’s a good as any other roof.
Traveler: Hey Farmer, you aren’t far from a fool, are you?
Farmer: Ain’t nothing but a fence between us.
I think that’s a fine joke. “In silence” does not depend on a pun; it depends on the historical fact that barbers tend to yap your ears off. Hair care of some sort is absolutely built into our species.
“How would you like your parasites picked?”
Grooming of each other may be built in, but that’s not quite the same thing as being a barber. The built-in grooming instinct would apply to close family members, mates, or the like. A barber is someone who grooms you despite not having any such close connection to you, and I expect that has to wait at least until the development of a structured economy.
And I can still envision a language (even if I don’t know any specific examples) where “Under what circumstances would you like this task to be performed?” and “What outcome do you desire from this task?” would be phrased entirely differently, and where thus no version of that joke would work.
I fail. What’s funny about this?
It’s a dick length joke.
Two guys are pissing into a lake, or river, or bathtub.
Do you find it amusing when I mention my fwiend Bigguth Dickuth?
…Sex jokes, but maybe not exactly the kind we think are funny today. Well… where the guy is so clueless that he doesn’t know how much his woman has been getting around. Cuckolding could get a laugh in Shakespeare’s time from the slightest mention. Aristophenes (?) made a point by having the women boycott sex until the men started behaving better.
Humor is edgy from its nature. Another topic would be religious jokes told at the expense of the local gods. Gotta be careful with those, fellows could find themselves in BAD trouble if those were told to the wrong audience.
Another set of jokes, pretty old, would be the ethnic jokes. Nothing quite as funny as telling how stupid or weak or cowardly those outsiders are.
From your link:
I note your disclaimer but any joke requiring a cell phone probably won’t meet the OP’s criteria.
I think this is the answer. Didn’t they send a picture of a vehicle stuck in a crevasse (or something) out with V-ger? NASA must have thought this type of humor was intergalactic.
I guess my main problem with this thread is that so many people do not realize that while the trappings change, the joke has been around for some time. I heard this joke long before cell phones existed, and my dad heard it before car phones existed, and my granddad heard it before pay phones existed, and . . . etc.
<<hold hand in unclenched fist, move back and forth>>
Not at all. Sex jokes work because sex is taboo and flirting with taboos is awkward and hence funny. If you were correct, jokes about precisely the same thing but with some other activity substituted for sex would work just as well as long as you got the audience’s attention. This just isn’t true.
Is there a version that involves smoke signals and the twang of a bowstring?