Joke Trivia
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118 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
Sumerian: the proverb claims one thing has never happened since time immemorial, a young woman not breaking wind in her husband's lap; Egypt's oldest known joke is some 300 years younger.
Q 02The Westcar Papyrus, home to one of the oldest recorded jokes, shares a museum with Nefertiti's bust in which city?
Berlin
Berlin's museum received the scroll in 1886, bought from the son of Karl Richard Lepsius, who said a niece of the traveller Henry Westcar gave it to him and who kept it in his attic.
Q 03What does the title of the Philogelos, the oldest surviving joke book, mean in Greek?
Laughter-Lover
Laughter-Lover is the usual English title; many of its 260-odd jokes feel strikingly modern, with an absent-minded scholar as a favourite butt.
Q 04A Philogelos joke about a complaint over a newly bought slave is called an ancestor of which Monty Python sketch?
Dead Parrot
In the Philogelos a buyer complains that his new slave has died, and the seller protests that with him 'he never did any such thing', much as the Dead Parrot's shopkeeper insists the bird is pining for the fjords.
Q 05An Egyptian joke from about 1600 BC suggests entertaining a bored pharaoh with a boatload of women dressed only in what?
Nets
Nets: the gag retells a tale from the Westcar Papyrus, in which a bored King Sneferu is advised to have the young women of his palace row him across a lake.
Q 06Which psychoanalyst published Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious in 1905?
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud argued that a joke lets a forbidden thought slip past our inhibitions, and he compared the way jokes work with the dream-work he had described a few years earlier.
Q 07Psychologist Richard Wiseman ran LaughLab, an online hunt for the world's funniest joke, from a university in which country?
United Kingdom
United Kingdom: Wiseman was based at the University of Hertfordshire. The site drew some 40,000 jokes, and the winner had a hunter, told to make sure his friend is dead, firing a shot.
Q 08LaughLab's winning joke was later traced to a 1951 Goons sketch thought to have been written by whom?
Spike Milligan
Spike Milligan's daughter said he had very likely written it: in the 1951 BBC clip one man asks whether a body is dead, another goes to make sure, and two shots ring out.
Q 09The cry 'Knock, knock, who's there' is sometimes traced to a drunken porter's speech in which Shakespeare play?
Macbeth
Macbeth's porter, roused by knocking just after Duncan's murder, plays gatekeeper of hell and cries 'Knock, knock! Who's there?' as he lets in one imaginary sinner after another.
Q 10The riddle about a chicken crossing the road was printed in 1847 in The Knickerbocker, a magazine from which city?
New York
New York's Knickerbocker, a literary monthly, printed the chicken riddle in 1847 as a conundrum whose flat answer, 'to get to the other side', is the whole joke.
Q 11In 'Who's on First?', which player is the pitcher?
Tomorrow
Tomorrow is the pitcher and Today the catcher. The routine never names a right fielder, and the shortstop, I Don't Give a Darn, turns up only in its closing lines.
Q 12Which duo's 'Who's on First?' gold record entered the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1956?
Abbott and Costello
Abbott and Costello's gold record of the routine went to Cooperstown in 1956, and the Hall plays the version they filmed for the 1945 comedy The Naughty Nineties.
Q 13Gilbert Gottfried told 'The Aristocrats' joke at a Friars Club roast of whom, weeks after 9/11?
Hugh Hefner
Hugh Hefner's Friars Club roast came weeks after 9/11; when a joke about the attacks drew hisses and a shout of 'too soon', Gottfried dropped his script and won the room back with The Aristocrats.
Q 21'I don't get no respect!' was the catchphrase of which comedian?
Rodney Dangerfield
Rodney Dangerfield gave up show business as a young man and sold aluminum siding for years, then returned in his forties and built a whole act on 'I don't get no respect'.
Q 22Which 1980 comedy cast the 'no respect' comic as the loudmouth Al Czervik?
Caddyshack
Caddyshack came out when the comic was 58 and led to starring film roles; born Jacob Cohen, he had worked as Jack Roy until a club owner gave him the stage name that stuck.
Q 23An old joke told so often that it has gone stale is known as an old what?
Chestnut
Chestnut may come from an 1816 play, The Broken Sword, in which a man retelling a story about a cork tree is cut off: he has told it 27 times, and the tree was a chestnut.
Q 14Which magician-comedian made the 2005 documentary The Aristocrats with fellow comic Paul Provenza?
Penn Jillette
Penn Jillette, the talking half of Penn & Teller, conceived and produced The Aristocrats with Paul Provenza, building a whole film out of comedians telling their own versions of one filthy joke.
Q 15Which term for a corny pun did Merriam-Webster add in September 2019?
Dad joke
Dad joke reached Merriam-Webster in September 2019, but the label is older: a 1987 Gettysburg Times column begged readers to preserve and revere 'Dad' jokes, not ban them.
Q 16Why does the psychiatrist lightbulb joke need only one psychiatrist?
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 17The bang in a Christmas cracker comes from a card strip coated with a fulminate of which precious metal?
Silver
Silver fulminate is so sensitive to friction that pulling the cracker's card strip sets it off; tradition says Tom Smith added the snap after hearing a log crackle on his fire.
Q 18Which 1930s prank toy from a Toronto rubber company did S. S. Adams reject as indelicate?
Whoopee cushion
The whoopee cushion struck Adams as too indelicate to sell, so its makers took it elsewhere; once sales took off, he brought out his own copy, the Razzberry Cushion.
Q 19On 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 20'Take my wife... please' is the signature line of which King of the One-Liners?
Henny Youngman
Henny Youngman said the line began as a sincere request: at a radio show he asked someone to show his wife to her seat, and it was taken as a joke.
Q 24Bazooka 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 25Which 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 26A jester's marotte, or bauble, parodied which royal object?
The sceptre
The sceptre was the model for the marotte, a stick topped with a carved head often dressed like its owner; with a cap and bells for his crown, the jester played a mock king.
Q 27Court jester Will Sommers cracked jokes for which English king?
Henry VIII
Henry VIII's fool Will Sommers outlasted his master, keeping his place at court under Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I and making his last public appearance at Elizabeth's coronation.
Q 28In Monty Python's 'The Funniest Joke in the World', what happens to Ernest Scribbler when he finishes writing it?
He dies laughing
He dies laughing the moment he reads his own joke back; the British Army then turns it into a weapon, giving each translator a single word to handle for safety.
Q 29The first show in the Comedy Central Roast series, in August 2003, targeted which comedian?
Denis Leary
Denis Leary was the first target, in a special made by his own company, Apostle; until then the channel had spent five years televising the Friars Club's roasts instead.
Q 30Whose 2011 Comedy Central Roast drew 6.4 million viewers, the most ever for one of the channel's roasts?
Charlie Sheen
Charlie Sheen's roast aired on September 19, 2011, an hour after his replacement made his debut on Two and a Half Men, and its 6.4 million viewers were never matched by a later roast.