The World’s Oldest Joke Book by Dan Crompton Review

Are you a history buff that loves bad puns and great one-liners? Are you the mother of a child that thinks any sort of fart joke is just hilarious? Then I’ve found the perfect joke book for you!

The World’s Oldest Joke Book is filled with jokes from Philogelos, a Roman joke book, which was written in 4th century A.D. The authors were a couple of Greeks scholars and they left little off limits and sometimes, to the imagination!

The jokes range from pretty mild (and this was my favorite):

I mean, I cannot be the only person that doesn’t want to always chit-chat with the person cutting my hair! This proves that my cynical nature is, in fact, pure nature! (No offense to any hair stylist out there!)

To silly:

*cough* Ahem, well. Kudos to him for trying! Other jokes in the book are a bit more PG-13 and even dribble into rated R territory, so I wouldn’t hand the book over to your younger kids or tweens. There are jokes about relationships, sex and even eunuchs. (Am I the only person that gets the scene from A History of the World; Part 1 in their head when they hear about eunuchs?)

Just a fair warning though, if you’re not a history buff or a lover of bad puns or one-liners, this book may not be for you. But I know there is someone if your life that would just love the book. For me, that was my father-in-law! The general outline of jokes has not changed much in the past 2000 years or so, but the delivery of the joke has. Some of the jokes went well over my head, but I found a fair amount amusing!

If you need an after holidays gift or even a just because I was thinking of you gift, The World’s Oldest Joke Book by Dan Crompton is the perfect book!

Buy It
You can buy The World’s Oldest Joke Book off of Amazon.com for $9.15

Connect
You can connect with Dan Crompton here and the publisher Sourcebooks on their website