The first place I saw the “man exploits man” joke was in Mad Magazine when I was a kid. It was probably around 50 years ago.
Come to think of it, I probably understood the joke because years ago, I’d heard a different version of it. The two men were flinty New Englanders, talking about a third person, all of whom supposedly shared the same ultra-conservative business practices as the Swiss. The punchline was, "Eustace Barron dipped into his capital!"
If I hadn’t heard that joke, I might have been puzzled too.
Old Israeli joke:
A news team is interviewing people at the airport. They walk up to an American, a Russian, a Somali and an Israeli, and ask them:
“Excuse me, what’s you’re opinion on the meat shortage?”
The American asks: “What’s a ‘shortage’?”
The Russian asks: “What’s an ‘opinion’?”
The Somali asks: "What’s ‘meat’?
The Israeli asks: “What’s ‘excuse me’?”
A Russian witticism: “Today is a pretty good day: not as good as yesterday, but definitely better than tomorrow!”
I heard a variation of this one from a Russian co-worker:
There were two Russian peasants who were neighbours. Mikhail had a cow and he made a little extra money selling milk. Boris didn’t have any cows and he had to struggle to get by. One day, a genie appeared and offered Boris one wish. Thinking for a moment he answered: ‘I want to be just as rich as my neighbour. Kill his cow!’
Or, as Plutarch had it: " δοκεῖ δέ μοι καὶ Καρχηδόνα μὴ εἶναι"
I heard this one from a Pole.
If Poland was attacked simultaneously by Germany and Russia, which one would they respond to?
Ans: Germany. Business before pleasure.
The person who told the joke didn’t know that phrase but gave the answer in a convoluted sentence, but that’s what he meant. Something like, “First you do what you have to and then what you enjoy.”
Another old Israeli joke. This one’s about Henry Kissinger, but it’s not really ABOUT Kissinger - it’s about the Israeli attitude toward “important” people:
Henry Kissinger is given a bolt of the finest silk as a gift from some dictator. He rushes to his tailor in London to make a suit out of it, but his tailor says that there simply isn’t enough fabric. He goes to Milan, and gets the same response. For months, wherever he travels, he asks a tailor to sew him a suit, and every time, he get’s the same response: there’s not enough fabric. Finally, he finds himself in Israel, where he wanders into a tailor’s shop.
The tailor looks at the silk and says, “Sure, I can make you a suit out of that. You want I should make you an extra pair of pants, too?”
Kissinger, amazed, says to him: “You know, this is the first place I’ve been where someone’s told me I had enough fabric for a suit!”
The tailor looks at him evenly, and says, “Here, you’re not that big.”
I don’t know where this comes from, probably somewhere in central Europe - Hungarians are the only people who can go into a revolving door behind you and come out in front.
In the USSR era, Hungarians had a joke that the Russians had developed a marvellous new breed of cow! It could feed in Hungary but be milked in Russia.