Something to cheer a January of storms, floods and diverted flights: Ian Hislop on the history of jokes. If my editors scrapped the rest of this review and printed just that sentence I think readers would be persuaded that there was something worth listening to this week.

Ian Hislop’s Oldest Jokes(on BBC Sounds and Radio 4) starts with the first English joke. Or the first joke about the English. Confronted with some attractive slaves in a marketplace Pope Gregory I is supposed to have quipped “non Angli sed Angeli” (“not Angles but angels”). Hislop is delighted by this.

More hesitant is Jonathan Wilcox (author of the unpromisingly titled Humour in Old English Literature), who hesitantly concedes that old English literature contains jokes that “might have been perceived possibly by some to have been funny”. But nothing can disrupt Hislop’s optimism. He chortles his way through the double entendre-ridden Anglo-Saxon riddles preserved in the Exeter Book: “A curious thing hangs by a man’s thigh … it is stiff and hard … When the man lifts his own garment he intends to greet with the head of his hanging object that familiar hole.” The polite answer is “key”. You may guess the rude one.

I also enjoyed the following exchange. Hislop: “Tell me about any other jokes. Are there any in the Anglo-Saxon chronicles?”

Expert: “Pffft. Not really.”

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