Saturday, November 06, 2004
A cruel joke for rest of the world
It has become not only fashionable but quite reasonable to turn to the
omni potent Google for anything and everything. In these days of
endless jokes getting circulated through internet and e mails, I
really want to test Google's wisdom. Most of us now know that Google
is no more a simply efficient search engine, but an answering giant as
well. Google's philosophy is simple- You ask a question. Set your
price. Get your answer.More than 500 carefully screened Researchers
are ready to answer your question for as little as $2.50 -- usually
within 24 hours. Your satisfaction is completely guaranteed ..
One questioner wanted to know the very OLDEST joke in the World.He was
expecting it to be a Mother-in-Law joke. But Google, before answering
the question makes some scholarly insights to jokes. It says " The
oldest surviving jokes are from ancient Egypt and are more-or-less
cartoons.Ancient Egyptian humor fell under five basic categories.
These are political satire, scatological humor, jokes concerning
sex,slapstick, and animal-based parodies.For satire, commoners would
make fun of leaders by showing pharaohs in an unflattering
manner.Drawings of defecating hyenas and drunken, vomiting party
guests are among the existing examples of scatological humor. While
the sex-based jokes consisted of "innuendoes and outright erotica",
slapstick comedy included drawings that showed people suffering
unfortunate accidents, such as hammers falling on heads, or passengers
falling out of boats.The ancient Egyptians had a special regard for
animal humor and cartoons, given the many examples of sketches on
papyrus, paintings,and other drawings such as ducks pecking at
someone's behind, baboons and cats out of control, animals riding on
top of other unlikely animals, baboons playing instruments, and
animals drinking and dining etc.
Is ancient humor still funny? Judge for yourself. Here is a typical
joke from an ancient Greek joke-book.
-Wishing to teach his donkey not to eat, a pedant did not offer him
any food. When the donkey died of hunger, he said "I've had a great
loss. Just when he had learned not to eat, he died".
The oldest "confirmed" joke in the world is actually a riddle:
Question - What animal walks on 4 feet in the morning, 2 at noon and 3
at evening?
Answer - Man. He goes on all fours as a baby, on two feet as a
man,and uses a cane in old age.
This is the oldest known written joke in the world. It was posed by
the Sphinx in ancient Greek mythology and answered by Oedipus.
But I found a more scholarly exposition on acceptability of jokes in
another website. It is at newscientist.com which calls themselves as
the world's No.1 science and technology news service. In a dispatch
made on 3rd October 02, they were revealing the World's funniest joke.
It was declared after an year-long online search for the world's
funniest joke.The winning rib-tickler emerged from two million ratings
of 40,000 entries, submitted by people from more than 70 countries.The
LaughLab experiment was run by psychologist Richard Wiseman and
colleagues at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. The data showed
clear national differences in humour, Wiseman says.People from the UK,
Ireland, Australia and New Zealand preferred jokes involving word
plays. American and Canadians found gags involving someone else
looking stupid most entertaining. And many European countries
preferred the surreal entries.Overall, Germans gave the LaughLab jokes
the highest ratings. But they did not express a strong preference for
any type of joke. Wiseman's team travelled widely to examine global
humour. They found that verbal jokes are common around the world,
except in one country. "It is very, very difficult to find
joke-telling in Japan," he says. The results suggest that people from
different parts of the world have fundamentally different senses of
humour. "Humour is vital to communication and the more we understand
about how people's culture and background affect their sense of
humour, the more we will be able to communicate effectively," says
Wiseman. Visitors to the site were asked to rate jokes on a
five-point scale. Of ratings for the world's second funniest joke, 64
per cent were a four or five. But an entry submitted by a psychiatrist
in Manchester, England, triumphed, with 65 per cent:
A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them
falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are
rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and
calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: "My friend is
dead! What can I do?" The operator, in a calm soothing voice, says:
"Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead."
There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back
on the line. He says: "OK, now what?" .
Does this joke sound somewhere similar to the cruel joke which was
committed on rest of the world by Americans this week. Yes, I am
referring to re-election of George W Bush. you do not know the joke on
"rest of the world". it was some 10 years ago. An agency was
commissioned to conduct a survey among different regions of the world
on " your opinion on shortage of food in rest of the world ". The
meaning of the word food was not known to at least some inhabitants of
the poor African countries. People from the then Eastern European
countries did not comprehend the word opinion. shortage was a new term
to people of Western Europe. The Americans totally failed to
understand what is meant by the expression "rest of the world".
Let me quote Mike Marqusee ( see www.mikemarqusee.com also ) from "
The Guardian" dated 4th Nov. " Anti- Americanism has become a catch-
all charge levied against anyone who engages in a radical critique of
America's global power, its sway over the lives of billions who had no
vote in Tuesday's election."
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