70 free Joke trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 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
It is a proverb about a young wife who has never once broken wind on her husband's lap, which means the fart joke is at least 4,000 years old.
Q 02In which city is the Westcar Papyrus, containing one of the oldest recorded jokes, on display?
Berlin
The papyrus tells five tales at the court of Khufu; in one, King Sneferu is cheered up when a magician has young women in net dresses row him around the palace lake.
Q 03What does the title of the Philogelos, the oldest surviving joke book, mean in Greek?
Laughter-Lover
It was compiled in roughly the fourth or fifth century AD and is written in crude Greek, which suggests it was aimed at ordinary readers rather than scholars.
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 seller replies that the slave never did that while he owned him. The book is traditionally attributed to two otherwise unknown men, Hierocles and Philagrius.
Q 05Roughly how many jokes does the Philogelos, the world's oldest joke book, contain?
264
Many are variations on a handful of set-ups, and a whole run of them mocks the citizens of Abdera, Cyme and Sidon as slow-witted.
Q 06Which psychoanalyst published Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious in 1905?
Sigmund Freud
He argued that a good joke lets us slip past our inhibitions, and he compared the techniques of joke-making to the dream-work he had described five years earlier.
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
Wiseman worked at the University of Hertfordshire; the History Channel later made a special about the project.
Q 08LaughLab's 'world's funniest joke' was later found to derive from a 1951 Goon Show sketch by which comedian?
Spike Milligan
The joke was submitted by Gurpal Gosal of Manchester. Wiseman later admitted it won because it was the joke fewest people hated, not the one most people loved.
Q 09Which punchline from a LaughLab computer-generated joke outscored a third of human entries?
A cereal killer
The set-up asked what kind of murderer has moral fibre. The most-submitted joke overall was 'What's brown and sticky?', which the machines had nothing to do with.
Q 10Knock-knock jokes swept the United States and Britain as a fad in which year?
1936
Radio comedian Fred Allen ended that year with a mock interview about the man who had 'invented a negative craze', which tells you how sick of them everyone already was.
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 magazine presented it as a conundrum with a disappointing answer, which is exactly why it works: it is anti-humour, a set-up that promises a punchline and delivers a plain fact.
Q 13In 'Who's on First?', which player is the pitcher?
Tomorrow
Today is the catcher, Because is in centre field and Why is in left. Time magazine 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
The three-minute film from Ticino was voiced by the respected Richard Dimbleby, and CNN later called it the biggest hoax any reputable news outlet ever pulled.
Q 22'Take my wife... please' is the signature line of which King of the One-Liners?
Henny Youngman
He said the line began as a misunderstanding: he asked a stagehand to seat his wife at a radio show and the man took it as a gag. He performed with a violin and bow as his prop.
Q 23'I don't get no respect!' was the catchphrase of which comedian?
Rodney Dangerfield
Q 14A gold record of 'Who's on First?' was placed in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in which year?
1956
A video of the routine, taken from the duo's 1945 film The Naughty Nineties, now plays on a loop at the Hall in Cooperstown.
Q 15Gilbert Gottfried brought 'The Aristocrats' joke to wider attention at a Friars Club roast of whom, 18 days after 9/11?
Hugh Hefner
Gottfried had just lost the room with a joke about the attacks and used the joke to win it back. Penn Jillette says it was Johnny Carson's favourite joke of all time.
Q 16Which magician-comedian co-directed the 2005 documentary The Aristocrats with Paul Provenza?
Penn Jillette
The joke has no fixed script: a family pitches a revolting act to a talent agent, and the teller improvises the filth. Only the set-up and the two-word punchline stay the same.
Q 17In which year did Merriam-Webster add 'dad joke' to its dictionary?
2019
The phrase is older than it looks: Jim Kalbaugh wrote an impassioned defence of the genre in The Gettysburg Times in June 1987.
Q 18'I'm hungry.' 'Hi, Hungry, I'm Dad.' That reply is the textbook example of which genre?
Dad joke
Dad jokes usually turn on a pun so obvious that the groan is the point; some deliberately have no real punchline at all.
Q 19Which chemical is used on the friction strip that makes a Christmas cracker bang?
Silver fulminate
London confectioner Tom Smith is credited with inventing crackers in 1847; his son Walter added the paper hats and gifts.
Q 20The modern rubber whoopee cushion was invented in the 1930s by the JEM Rubber Company of which city?
Toronto
Employees were experimenting with scrap rubber. Prank-toy king S. S. Adams turned the invention down as too vulgar to sell, which remains one of the great business misjudgements.
He opened his own New York club, Dangerfield's, in 1969, and his breakout film role came at 58 as the loudmouth golfer in Caddyshack.
Q 24Before he was Rodney, the comedian who famously got no respect was born under which name?
Jacob Cohen
He later legally became Jack Roy. The other names belong to Gene Wilder, Lenny Bruce and George Burns respectively.
Q 25How many numbered jokes did the first edition of Joe Miller's Jests (1739) contain?
247
John Mottley compiled it after Miller's death, and only three of the jokes were actually about Miller. Later editions kept swelling, and the quality kept sinking.
Q 26Bazooka Joe, the bubble-gum comic-strip hero, is instantly recognisable by what?
An eyepatch
His sidekick Mort wears a red turtleneck pulled up over his mouth. Topps stopped putting the comics in the gum in 2012 as sales fell.
Q 27Which British humour magazine, founded in 1841, gave 'cartoon' its modern comic-drawing meaning?
Punch
The joke was aimed at grand 'cartoons' (preparatory drawings) proposed for murals in the new Houses of Parliament in 1843. The magazine finally closed in 2002.
Q 28A jester's cap and bells mirrored a crown. Which royal object did the marotte stand in for?
The sceptre
The get-up advertised 'jester's privilege', the licence to mock and to deliver bad news that nobody else at court dared to bring the king.
Q 29Will Sommers, one of history's best-documented court jesters, cracked jokes for which English king?
Henry VIII
Poland's most famous jester, Stańczyk, worked the same century and made his name with political gags, which was a riskier line of work.
Q 30In Monty Python's 'The Funniest Joke in the World', what happens to Ernest Scribbler when he finishes writing it?
He dies laughing
The British Army weaponises the joke against Germany, with each translator working on a single word for their own safety; the war ends with a joke-warfare ban at the Geneva Convention.