Try Not to Laugh: 99% Crack Before Question 5
Rumor around here says almost nobody survives this page with a straight face — and yes, we started the rumor ourselves, specifically so you would try to disprove it. The rules are simple and merciless: read each scenario, monitor your own face like a hawk, and report what happened with total honesty.
No judges, no cameras, just you, a twitching mouth, and your conscience. Points are awarded for composure, meaning every snort costs you dearly. Around question four, most challengers fold like cheap lawn chairs. Prove the rumor wrong, or become its newest supporting evidence.
See every possible result for this quiz and what each one means →
Two hundred and sixty-odd jokes outlived the empire that told them
The oldest surviving joke collection in Greek is the Philogelos, the laughter-lover, and it runs to roughly 265 items. The compilation is generally placed in late antiquity, around the fourth or fifth century, though much of the material is plainly older and had been in circulation for a long time before anyone wrote it down.
Its favourite target is the scholastikos, the over-educated fool. One shuts his eyes in front of a mirror to find out how he looks while asleep. Another, told that his beard is coming through, goes and waits at the back door in case it arrives there. The structures are immediately familiar: setup, misdirection, and the deciding word held back until last. Whatever else has changed in fifteen hundred years, the machinery has not.
Every language keeps a village of fools
The Philogelos also mocks the residents of particular towns, Abdera and Kyme and Sidon among them, as proverbially slow. That habit turns out to be close to universal. England had the wise men of Gotham, whose supposed idiocies filled a printed jest book in the sixteenth century, complete with the tale of villagers feigning madness to keep the king's road away from their door. Yiddish folklore has Chelm, a town whose earnest sages solve every problem catastrophically. German tradition has Schilda.
The pattern is stable enough to look like a need rather than a coincidence. Somewhere just over the hill, people are doing it wrong, and the jokes write themselves.
The stale joke acquired a surname in 1739
Joe Miller was a London comic actor who died in 1738. The year after, a writer published a collection of jests under his name, apparently with very little connection to the man himself, and it sold well enough to be reprinted and expanded for a century. By the Victorian period, calling something a Joe Miller meant it was an old chestnut you had heard far too many times already.
There is a lesson in that for any try-not-to-laugh challenge, this one included. Almost nothing that breaks your composure is new. It is simply arriving from an angle you were not covering, which is the only trick jokes have ever really had.
