Writer takes serious look at history of laughs

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A talkative barber asks a customer, "How shall I cut your hair?"

"In silence!" is the response.

That two-liner from ancient Greece is one of the many jokes writer Jim Holt found as he traced the evolution of jokes in his new book "Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes."

Holt, a New York-based science writer, said he always found joke-telling to be an interesting phenomenon.

"It's the only domain of creative activity where a very complex cerebral stimulus, a little bit of nonsense ... will elicit this massive and grossly physiological response," he said in an interview.

No one knows who uttered the first joke but Holt said that in ancient Athens comedians gathered in the Temple of Heracles to trade jokes.

A recent study by researchers at the University of Wolverhampton in England found that the oldest recorded joke was from 1900 BC in Sumeria, now southern Iraq. It's about female flatulence, showing toilet humor has always been popular.

Jokes may have flourished with the advent of urban life, as the growth of commerce and social interaction obliged people to humor each other, according to Holt.

While sex and scatological jokes continue to be favorites, he said western humor evolved from the mid-19th century into more of an intellectual exercise involving witty paradox.

Among today's professional jokesters, the stand-up comedians that are the staple of late-night television, Holt said that jokes have shifted away from punch lines to more observational humor in the style of American comedian Jerry Seinfeld.

One key function of the joke is to provide relief in the form of gallows humor, he said, even on topics that might seem highly inappropriate, such as the Sept 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

Some are in the form of children's knock-knock jokes: "Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "9-11." "9-11 who?" "You said you'd never forget!"

"When people finally told 9-11 jokes, I mean, what a relief," he said. "And Holocaust jokes ... sometimes it's the only way to provide relief, in a sort of therapeutic way."

But he said he's also heard plenty of German Auschwitz jokes that are "just plain vile". With those jokes, including ones about race and handicaps, much depends on who tells the joke and their intention. Often the line is not so clear.

"I'm hoping that there might be a harmony between the values of humor and morality," he said. "But I feel certain this isn't the case. I think there are probably deeply immoral jokes that are very funny."

Holt doesn't think humor is a crucial quality for leadership and said many jokes by politicians are often bad. Even if the jokes are good, they can be risky, he said.

"Americans today have this incredibly thin skin," he said. "You always offend somebody."

(Reporting by Ritsuko Ando, editing by Patricia Reaney)