The other day, I went to a 3D show with my wife. We put on our glasses and she asked me, “Do your glasses make things appear darker? Everything looks dark with my glasses.”

“Umm,” I said as I scanned the screen and my surroundings with my 3D glasses, “Not really. Maybe your eyes need to adjust. My eyes usually take a while.”

A quick “Hmm” was her response and we continued to watch the 3D movie previews.

After several minutes, my wife leaned over and whispered, “Have your eyes adjusted yet?”

“Yeah, they have,” I responded with my eyes focused on the screen. The movie had just begun.

“Everything looks blurry to me,” she whispered, “And still very dark.” She slurped her red Icee and continued to watch the film anyway.

Immediately, I remembered the time when she had a throbbing headache for an entire day. Her vision was blurry, she couldn’t see straight, and she had to drive home thirty minutes from work that way. She was a complete mess the entire evening until we discovered that she was wearing only one contact lens.

“Do you have both contacts in?” I asked whispering.

“Yeah, I made sure both were in before we left the house,” she softly replied.

I then recalled another evening when she complained about her blurry vision. She was sure that she had both contacts in that time so we agreed that she just needed a new prescription. Later, however, we found out that not only did she have both lenses in, but another pair on top of them.

“Are you sure you only have one set in?” I quietly asked.

“I’m positive,” she whispered, “They were the last set in the box.”

“Maybe your 3D glasses are defective,” I whispered back.

She looked at me and shrugged her shoulders when I noticed she was wearing her sunglasses; her 3D glasses were hanging from the neck of her shirt.

“What do you think I should do?” she asked me.

by Romil Benyamino

You can watch me get interviewed tonight on www.anbsat.com at 7:00PM PST. It’s my first live interview and I am everything but prepared! So tune in—there will be music, a short funny sketch, and maybe some phone calls, that is, if you choose to call…

I ran into a 13th century book written in Syriac by a Bishop named Gregory Bar Hebraeus titled ktawa d’toonaye makkhikane (ܟܬܵܒܼܵܐ ܕܬܘܼܢܵܝܹ̈ܐ ܡܲܓܚܸܟܵܢܹ̈ܐ), whichin Assyrian means book of funny tales. Although Bar Hebraeus wrote hilarious tales about cheapskates, wealthy people, and entertaining stories of the wise, my favorite chapter has to be sixteen which comprises short tales on simpletons. Today’s Assyrians are still telling simpleton jokes, and I was surprised at how little the humor has changed over 700 years. I told my parents the four below and lo and behold they laughed,

564: Another fool said, “My father went twice to Jerusalem; there he died and was buried, but I don’t know which time he died, during the first visit or the last.” 

 566: When another fool was told, “Somebody stole your ass.” He said, “Oh thank God I wasn’t on him.”

 587: Another simpleton was running along and crying out certain words with a loud voice, and when he was asked why he did this, he said, “I want to know how far my voice will reach.”

595: Another fool owned a house together with some other folk, and he said one day, “I want to sell the half that is my share and buy the other half, so that the whole building may be mine.”

In 1897, E.A.W. Budge translated the bishop’s work from Syriac to English; titling it The Laughable Stories of Bar-Hebraeus. Some of the humor is lost since Budge uses archaic thy-thou English grammar; however, his literal translation makes it very easy to translate back into Assyrian or even into a more funny English form. Budge’s English translation can be found here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/asia/lsbh/index.htm, and a PDF of the actual text including the Syriac writing is available here: http://www.archive.org/details/laughablestories00barhrich.

A 700 year old joke is old but not that old, which is why I was curious to find out what the oldest joke in the world is. I set off to Google to spend a long two seconds of my life searching, and here is what I found, “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” The world’s oldest recorded joke, and it happens to be Sumerian, dating back to 1900 B.C. 500 miles south of where Bar Hebraeus lived. What the heck, I thought, I’ll spend an additional twenty minutes translating the translation of the world’s oldest joke back into Assyrian (into the modern form that is, and not into it’s original Akkadian form)—so I did,

ܗܿܘ ܡܸܢܕܝܼ ܕܗܸܟ̃ ܠܹܠܹܐ ܗܘܝܼܵܐ ܓܵܘ ܚܕܵܐ ܕܘܿܪܵܐ܇ ܚܕܵܐ ܒܲܟܼܬܵܐ ܠܵܐ ܪܹܛܵܠܵܗܿ ܓܵܘ ܚܦܵܩܵܐ ܕܓܲܒܼܪܵܐ܀

“oh mindee d’hich lele weeya go khda dora; khda bakhta la rethala go khpaqa d’gora.”

Article by Romil Benyamino