The Oldest Joke

Jan 1

The Periodic Inscrutable by Arthur Trope

Artie just got back from India by way of France, where he’d been granted access to study the ancient Vedic Sanskrit comics collection at the University of Mumbai, and then received a private tour of the Lascaux Caves near Montignac. He came back Sunday night with a monster case of jet lag and Delhi belly, but he says the first-hand access to some of the world's oldest preserved single-panel comic concepts was more than worth it. Apparently he gathered an entire curriculum for the summer course he teaches at UW called "Archetypical Patterns in Single-Panel Comics, 1914-1946". I'm not sure how studying ancient Vedic Sanskrit comics and the cave paintings of Stone Age France applies to the syllabus necessarily, but some grant money came through and it opened a few doors, so I guess he'll work it in. He expensed the rest of the trip on his corporate Amex, because he says he uncovered a goldmine and has a lifetime of new panel ideas. His first big insight - after two weeks spent in white gloves handling precious fragments from stone tablets, and shards of petrified wooden planks, and faded sheets of linen parchment, under the watchful eye of Dr. Amit Bhat, the UM’s ancient comics curator - was the prevalence of "When I was your age…" gags in the prehistoric Bhimbetka rock shelters, dating as far back as mid-6th Century BC. Which was surprising because people didn’t tend to live very long in those days, so "When I was your age" gags would be limited to an age difference of maybe a decade and a half - and also because technology wasn't exactly advancing at lightning speed, so presumably there was a lot less material to work with. Yet the repeated variations on this particular gag throughout these ancient comics reveal a kind of pre-Iron Age irony that hasn't been much explored - in the Western literature anyway. Although there have been disputed attempts to ascribe comic elements to several of the cave drawings of Lascaux, where Artie observed firsthand those famed aurochs depicted as the oafs of the Paleolithic era, treated by the other animals with a certain sly condescension. Neanderthals, too, were painted by Homo sapiens with (arguably) exaggerated features to some comedic effect – yet in Artie’s analysis, those primitive works lack the comic sophistication on display in the Mumbai collection, and their influence on single-panel comic development have not, to date, withstood meaningful peer review.

Artie's second insight from Mumbai: Vedic Sanskrit had no written component - it pre-dated Brahmi script - so those comic ideas, variations of which have been found from recently unearthed stone shelters in Bhimbetka all the way to the Bay of Bengal, were drawn in ochre on cave walls and the captions were then passed down for generations by word of mouth, and only later preserved on the stone tablets, wooden planks and linen parchment that were eventually excavated and made their way to Dr. Bhat’s collection. One can only wonder how these captions evolved over those many centuries, even as the images remained frozen in time.

Artie spent the return flight running back and forth from the lavatory to his middle seat, where he drafted a paper on his findings for submission to The New England Journal of Single-Panel Comics, and doodling in his Moleskin, where he'd taped photocopies of several ancient comic images he'd found most relatable today. The oldest comic idea in Dr. Bhat's collection depicts an adult, bearded male, looking down on a young boy pushing what looks like a wheelbarrow, and saying, "When I was you’re age, we had to carry our शकट (carts) on our शुप्ति (shoulders)." So Artie decided to update this ancient gag, riffing a bit, and setting the scene at the base of a volcano, and featuring an oldish caveman and a young boy on a bicycle. Enjoy… -Ed.