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Bathroom humor has a proud literary tradition, with breaking wind having been a particularly popular scatological topic for millennia. Throughout history, the chance to make an occasional fart joke has often proven irresistible, even to such influential authors as Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain. Here are 11 references to uproarious cheese cutting made by some of the most esteemed writers of all time.
1. The First Joke Ever Recorded // 1900 BCE
Who says girls don’t fart? According to University of Wolverhampton professor Paul McDonald, this ancient Sumerian one-liner is the oldest known joke in recorded history: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”
Selected by David Wheatley
In the fourth installment of The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry, curated by 2008 Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize-winner David Wheatley, five Irish poets – the experimental Trevor Joyce, religious celebrant Aidan Mathews, elegist Peter McDonald, modern poet Ailbhe Darcy, and Irish speaker Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh – receive their official publication debut among North American readers.
In the anthology’s preface, Wheatley notes that despite his chosen poets’ regional variance and differences in age (37 years separate Joyce, the eldest poet in the collection, and Ní Ghearbhuigh, the youngest), his selection takes care to evade “questions of generational groups and territoriality to explore a series of related but distinct issues” in each of the five bodies of work. In this he is successful: the anthology is a latticework of themes, from troubled love, as seen in Joyce’s defiant “I will not die for you” and the raw honesty of Ní Ghearbhuigh
Letters
Don’t blame the UK’s Covid death toll on our rule-averse culture, writes
Robert Webb.
Adrian Paterson traces literary references to an earlier pandemic
People wearing masks during a five-day lockdown in Perth, Australia. Photograph: Richard Wainwright/EPA
People wearing masks during a five-day lockdown in Perth, Australia. Photograph: Richard Wainwright/EPA
Tue 2 Feb 2021 13.06 EST
Last modified on Tue 2 Feb 2021 13.09 EST
I cannot agree with Michele Gelfand’s assertion that cultural factors in our willingness to follow rules explain the stark difference between how different countries perform in dealing with the Covid-19 virus (Why countries with ‘loose’, rule-breaking cultures have been hit harder by Covid, 1 February).