Short answers, pulled from the story.
A Sumerian proverb from 1900 BC contains the oldest identified joke in human history. This record dates back to the Old Babylonian period and may go as far back as 2300 BC.
British TV channel Dave commissioned a team of academics led by humour expert Paul McDonald from the University of Wolverhampton to research these examples in 2008. Their condition required a clear set-up and punch line structure to qualify as a joke.
The earliest extant joke book is the Philogelos, written in crude ancient Greek during the fourth or fifth century AD. This collection contains 265 jokes and translates to The Laughter-Lover.
One early anthology called Facetiae by Italian Poggio Bracciolini first published in 1470. Twenty editions of this book were documented alone for the 15th century.
Victor Raskin developed the Script-based Semantic Theory of Humour to explain how this works. Humour evokes when a trigger in the punchline causes the audience to abruptly shift understanding from a primary interpretation to a secondary opposing one.
Sigmund Freud published his 1905 study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious as one of the first modern scholarly recognitions of jokes as important objects of investigation. His work distinguishes between jokes, humour, and the comic.