Every day, in "Historically yours" on Europe 1, the journalist David Castello-Lopes tells the origins of a concept or an everyday object.

He is interested Thursday in puns, these "jokes of darons", he says, which make us smile… for 35,000 years all the same. 

They are everywhere in the newspapers and are exchanged on the fly at the coffee machine or during family dinners.

Word games, more or less successful, elicit a few smiles or as many sighs depending on their quality.

Thursday in

Historically yours

 on Europe 1, the journalist David Castello-Lopes tells the origin of these witticisms.

Believe it or not, the oldest dates back over ... 35,000 years. 

"The pun is simply the archetype of what we call the 'daron joke'. Those jokes where you get the best possible reaction from your audience like, 'Ah! Not bad ...' In worst case scenario, you get hatred from your interlocutor. Pun is also the preferred way of writing for many funny journalists, who write short sentences like 'Chinese Castex'. There are also people who use the pun to make jokes about my country What is a laughing pig? A cheerful pig (Portuguese), of course.

Word games in ancient Egypt

Deep down, it's strange that the pun survives.

We keep making them, we keep hating them, we still find them 'funny because they suck'.

And as bad as they are, some have been around since the dawn of time.

For John Pollack, American author of a book on the subject, the first pun in human history is visual.

It is a 35,000-year-old statuette of a naked woman.

If you turn it 180 degrees, it becomes an erect penis.

Two different ideas in the same object, it is the same principle as two ideas in the same sound, that is to say the basis of the play on words.

>> Find the shows of Matthieu Noël and Stéphane Bern in replay and podcast here

Then we find puns in ancient Egypt.

An inscription mentions in particular the god Seth trying to seduce the god Horus by telling him that he has a nice butt.

But the word 'behind', in ancient Egyptian, is apparently said to be the same as the word force.

'I admire your buttocks / I admire your strength', a double meaning and a 4,000 year old joke.

An American Word Game Championship 

As for the first famous pun, it probably appears in

Homer's

Odyssey

.

Cyclops Polyphemus asks Ulysses what his name is and Ulysses answers 'Nobody'.

When he punctures the eye of the Cyclops and the other Cyclops ask Polyphemus who hurt him, the Cyclops therefore answers 'nobody'.

The others go and leave him to his sad fate.

When you think about it, this joke that dates from 800 BC is quite similar to the one from the

Dinner of Cons

two millennia later, which involves a character whose name is 'Leblanc' and the first name 'Juste'.  

In the United States, there are even word game championships, where contestants have to do word games on a theme, such as country names, in a limited time and in front of an audience.

Moreover, if John Pollack wrote this book on word games, it is because he himself was the champion of the said competition in 1995! "