The world's oldest recorded joke is a Sumerian fart joke
The oldest surviving written joke is Sumerian, pressed into clay at least 3,900 years ago, and it is a piece of bathroom humor: it quips that something which has never happened since the dawn of time is a young wife not breaking wind in her husband's lap. It survives on tablets from the Old Babylonian period and predates the oldest known Egyptian gag by roughly three centuries.
How we know
A 2008 study led by Dr. Paul McDonald ranked the oldest recorded jokes; the oldest is a Sumerian proverb dated to at least 1900 BCE (Old Babylonian period). It predates the next-oldest, an Egyptian joke about King Snofru (c.1600 BCE), by about three centuries. 1900 BCE to 2026 ≈ 3,926 years.
One of many fact-checked wonders across eight traditions at The Spring of Wisdom.