Joke Trivia
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120 free Joke trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Jokes have a history, and it is stranger than most punchlines. The oldest recorded gag is a 4,000-year-old Sumerian fart joke, the earliest surviving joke book is a Greek collection whose parrot bit predates Monty Python by 1,600 years, and a British psychologist once ran a year-long experiment to find the single funniest joke on Earth. This quiz is about all of that: where jokes come from, who told them best, and the props, pranks and formats that turned laughter into an industry. You will meet the King of the One-Liners and his violin, the Danish immigrant who invented the joy buzzer, the sound engineer whose padlocked laff box supplied decades of sitcom giggles, the whoopee cushion, the Christmas cracker, Bazooka Joe, elephant jokes, Chuck Norris facts and the moth that walked into a podiatrist's office. Easy questions cover Fozzie Bear, dad jokes and why the chicken crossed the road; the hard end asks which Broadway songwriter wrote the first 'in Soviet Russia' gag and who dared tell The Aristocrats eighteen days after 9/11. Every answer has been checked against encyclopaedia and reference articles on the joke, the comedian or the event, and each question shows its citation once you have answered. Nothing here is a joke itself, so no one gets ambushed by a punchline they already know.
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Q 01The oldest known joke, toilet humour from about 1900 BC, comes from which civilisation?
Sumerian
The Sumerian proverb, from about 1900 BC, describes a young wife who has never farted in her husband's lap; a 2008 University of Wolverhampton study named it the oldest known joke.
Q 02In which city is the Westcar Papyrus, containing one of the oldest recorded jokes, on display?
Berlin
The Westcar Papyrus is held by the Egyptian Museum in Berlin; its five tales of magic at Khufu's court include Sneferu being rowed across a lake by women in net dresses.
Q 03What does the title of the Philogelos, the oldest surviving joke book, mean in Greek?
Laughter-Lover
Philogelos means "Laughter-Lover" in Greek; the collection was compiled around the fourth or fifth century AD and is attributed to Hierocles and Philagrius.
Q 04A joke in the ancient Philogelos about a newly bought slave dying is called an ancestor of which Monty Python sketch?
Dead Parrot
The Philogelos seller protests that the slave 'never did that' while he owned him, echoing the Dead Parrot sketch's pet-shop owner who claims the bird is pining for the fjords.
Q 05Roughly how many jokes does the Philogelos, the world's oldest joke book, contain?
264
The Philogelos holds about 264 jokes, many of them variations on a few set-ups, including a run mocking the citizens of Abdera, Cyme and Sidon as dim-witted.
Q 06Which psychoanalyst published Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious in 1905?
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud's 1905 book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious argued that jokes let us slip past inhibitions, comparing joke technique to the dream-work of his 1900 Interpretation of Dreams.
Q 07In 2002, psychologist Richard Wiseman ran LaughLab, a year-long online hunt for the world's funniest joke, from a university in which country?
United Kingdom
LaughLab ran from the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom, collecting some 40,000 jokes from around the world before naming a winner in October 2002.
Q 08LaughLab's 'world's funniest joke' was later found to derive from a 1951 Goon Show sketch by which comedian?
Spike Milligan
Spike Milligan wrote the gag for a 1951 Goon Show episode; the LaughLab version, submitted by Gurpal Gosal of Manchester, had two hunters and a bungled emergency call.
Q 09Which punchline from a LaughLab computer-generated joke outscored a third of human entries?
A cereal killer
The computer-written joke 'What kind of murderer has moral fibre? A cereal killer' was rated funnier than about a third of the human-submitted entries in LaughLab.
Q 10Knock-knock jokes swept the United States and Britain as a fad in which year?
1936
The knock-knock craze hit in 1936; radio comedian Fred Allen closed the year with a mock interview about the man who had 'invented a negative craze'.
Q 11'Knock, knock! Who's there?' is sometimes traced to a drunken porter's speech in which Shakespeare play?
Macbeth
In Act 2, Scene 3 the porter imagines himself as the gatekeeper of hell, admitting one sinner after another as the knocking continues.
Q 12'Why did the chicken cross the road?' first appeared in 1847 in The Knickerbocker, a magazine from which city?
New York
The Knickerbocker was a New York literary monthly; its 1847 item posed the chicken question as a conundrum whose flat answer, 'to get to the other side', is the whole joke.
Q 13In 'Who's on First?', which player is the pitcher?
Tomorrow
Tomorrow is the pitcher and Today the catcher; Because plays centre field and Why is in left. Time named the routine the best comedy sketch of the 20th century in 1999.
Q 21On April Fools' Day 1957, BBC's Panorama showed Swiss farmers harvesting what?
Spaghetti
Panorama's three-minute film showed a Ticino family pulling spaghetti from trees, narrated by Richard Dimbleby; hundreds of viewers phoned the BBC asking how to grow their own.
Q 22'Take my wife... please' is the signature line of which King of the One-Liners?
Henny Youngman
Henny Youngman, billed as the King of the One-Liners, said the line began when he asked an usher to take his wife to her seat at a radio show and was taken to be joking.
Q 23'I don't get no respect!' was the catchphrase of which comedian?
Rodney Dangerfield
Rodney Dangerfield built his act around 'I don't get no respect', opened the Manhattan club Dangerfield's in 1969 and broke into film at 58 as Caddyshack's loudmouth golfer.
Q 14A gold record of 'Who's on First?' was placed in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in which year?
1956
The Hall of Fame in Cooperstown accepted a gold record of the routine in 1956; the Hall also shows the duo's film version from the 1945 comedy The Naughty Nineties.
Q 15Gilbert Gottfried brought 'The Aristocrats' joke to wider attention at a Friars Club roast of whom, 18 days after 9/11?
Hugh Hefner
The Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner took place on September 29, 2001; after a 9/11 gag drew shouts of 'too soon', Gottfried won the room back with The Aristocrats.
Q 16Which magician-comedian co-directed the 2005 documentary The Aristocrats with Paul Provenza?
Penn Jillette
Penn Jillette, the talking half of Penn & Teller, co-directed The Aristocrats with Paul Provenza; the film shows around 100 comedians telling the same filthy joke.
Q 17In which year did Merriam-Webster add 'dad joke' to its dictionary?
2019
Merriam-Webster added the term in its September 2019 batch of new words, tracing it back to a 1987 Gettysburg Times column by Jim Kalbaugh.
Q 18In the lightbulb joke about psychiatrists, why does changing the bulb take only one?
The bulb has to really want to change
The psychiatrist lightbulb joke's answer is that the bulb has to really want to change, a dig at talk therapy's reliance on the patient's own motivation.
Q 19Which chemical is used on the friction strip that makes a Christmas cracker bang?
Silver fulminate
Christmas cracker snaps are coated with silver fulminate, a shock-sensitive explosive that bangs when the strips are pulled apart; Tom Smith is credited with inventing crackers in 1847.
Q 20The modern rubber whoopee cushion was invented in the 1930s by the JEM Rubber Company of which city?
Toronto
The JEM Rubber Company of Toronto hit on the whoopee cushion while experimenting with scrap rubber; prank-toy maker S. S. Adams first turned it down as too vulgar.
Q 24The comedian who played Caddyshack's Al Czervik was born under which name?
Jacob Cohen
The comedian was born Jacob Cohen on Long Island in 1921 and legally became Jack Roy before adopting his stage name; the other options are Gene Wilder, Lenny Bruce and George Burns.
Q 25How many numbered jokes did the first edition of Joe Miller's Jests (1739) contain?
247
The 1739 first edition of Joe Miller's Jests had 247 numbered jokes, compiled by John Mottley a year after Miller's death; only three were actually about Miller.
Q 26Bazooka Joe, the bubble-gum comic-strip hero, is instantly recognisable by what?
An eyepatch
Bazooka Joe wears a black eyepatch; Topps dropped the comic strips from the gum wrappers in 2012, replacing them with puzzles and codes.
Q 27Which British humour magazine, founded in 1841, gave 'cartoon' its modern comic-drawing meaning?
Punch
Punch ran John Leech's 'Cartoon, No. 1' in 1843, mocking the grand preparatory 'cartoons' submitted for the new Houses of Parliament murals, and the comic sense of the word stuck.
Q 28A jester's marotte, or bauble, parodied which royal object?
The sceptre
The marotte, the jester's stick topped with a tiny head, parodied the king's sceptre, just as the cap and bells stood in for the crown.
Q 29Will Sommers, one of history's best-documented court jesters, cracked jokes for which English king?
Henry VIII
Will Sommers served Henry VIII from about 1525 and stayed at court into Elizabeth I's reign; he appears beside the king in a family portrait of around 1545.
Q 30In Monty Python's 'The Funniest Joke in the World', what happens to Ernest Scribbler when he finishes writing it?
He dies laughing
Ernest Scribbler dies laughing the moment he reads his own joke back; the British Army then weaponises it, with each translator handling a single word for safety.