While reading up on jokes across the world and from all over human history for 40k work, I stumbled upon a delightful surprise: Egyptian humour. Apparently the densely populated and hypersocial Nile valley in Egypt have sported a culture of wisecracks and jokesters for almost five millennia, at the very least. A short extract from this article should be of interest to history lovers around here, and possibly inspire some Tomb King shenanigans:
Modern Egyptians have it going. I can recommend these ones (baked into longer articles): https://connectedincairo.com/2012/04/07/telling-mubarak-jokes/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/03/three-decades-of-a-joke-that-just-wont-die-2/ Also, the corrupt Egyptian police calls their bribes for their pension fund. I have a hard time finding ancient Egyptian jokes on Google, because the search results keep being modern jokes about ancient Egypt (jokes about mummies, puns and the like), not jokes from ancient Egypt. But I'll post it here if I find more. Though I guess the Turin erotic papyrus is all an elaborate ancient joke. Half the scroll is all animals acting like humans, and the other half is humans having an orgy while making fun of each other. In general, I can just warmly recommend John Romer's two series about ancient Egypt. There is some Egyptian humour in there: Romer's Egypt Ancient Lives Also, many of the best modern Egyptian jokes are in the same spirit as jokes from the Soviet Union: Things are trash, but at least we're in on the joke together. My delving into joke floras translated into English from around the world made it clear that Russia and Egypt sported fantastic jokes even in the midst of terror, where many other cultures would have found it distasteful to joke about such things. Germans also had good car jokes about Trabant in DDR days, and Chinese have good jokes about henpecked husbands. Cheers!