Have you ever seen that Monty Python sketch about the guy who tries to return a dead parrot to the pet store, and the shop owner refuses it, insisting that the bird is just "resting?" It's widely considered one of the funniest and most prolific comedy sketches of all time, and it turns out that the ancient Greeks wrote a similar version of it about 1600 years earlier.  Perhaps the Monty Python troupe was just "homaging."

Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, written in the 4th century AD, is one of the world's oldest joke books.  It features a bit in which a man complains that a slave he has just bought has died.  "By the gods," answers the slave's seller, "when he was with me, he never did any such thing."  Even more amazing is that the book shows how little our sense of human has changed over the centuries.  Many of the set-ups and pay-offs resemble the same joke structures we use today.

Reuters writes:

The English-language book will appeal to those who swear that the old jokes are the best ones. Many of its 265 gags will seem strikingly familiar, suggesting that sex, dimwits, nagging wives and flatulence have raised laughs for centuries...

In many of the jokes, a slow-witted figure known as the "student dunce" is the butt of the jokes. In one, the student dunce goes to the city and a friend asks him to buy two 15-year-old slaves: No problem,' responds the dunce. If I don't find two 15-year-olds, I'll get one 30-year-old.'

In another, someone asks to borrow the student's cloak to go down to the country. "I have a cloak to go down to your ankle, but I don't have one that reaches to the country," he replies.

Philogelos can be purchased online as an e-book, and features veteran British comedian Jim Bowen reviving the lines for a modern audience.  The publisher released a statement saying it's like "Jurassic Park for jokes."  As for Bowen, he says he's seen a few of the jokes still used in comedy clubs today, only slightly updated: "They put in a motor car instead of a chariot."