Bangkok--1 Apr--Image Impact
Program Title: April's Fool Special: History of the Joke
Channel: HISTORY on TrueVisions A23 and D48
Telecast Date: Wednesday, April 1, 2009 at 8.00 p.m. (Thai)
In this two hour special, we'll go on a journey to find the world's oldest jokes. We'll go to Ancient Greece, where a comedians' club called the Group of Sixty met in the temple of Heracles to trade wisecracks. One of the Greeks favorites: making fun of Pericles's onion shaped head. We'll travel to Ancient Rome and hear from the oldest surviving joke book, the 4th century AD Philogelos. Their jokes include the same characters we joke about today-- drunks, cheapskates, loose women, misogynistic men and the maligned neighboring ethnic group. From Rome, we travel to the Vatican and hear from the first European joke book. Collected by Poggio during the Renaissance, much of his material came out of a joke club in the Vatican called the Bugiale, aka the "fib factory." Here, papal scribes would gather at the end of a tedious day spent drafting bulls, dispensations, and encyclicals to shoot the breeze and tell scandalous stories.