Joe Miller's Jests, with Copious Additions

Here is a joke book named after a man who wasn't funny. Joe Miller was a comic actor in 18th-century London, famous enough in his lifetime, but by all accounts a quiet, serious fellow offstage. Then he died, and someone published a collection of jests under his name, and the joke was on him: Joe Miller became synonymous with humor he never actually made. This 1739 edition collects the original jests plus "copious additions" - puns, bawdy tales, sharp retorts, and observational wit that made our ancestors laugh before smartphones, before cinema, before electricity. The humor is period-specific (some of it has not aged well; much of it remains uncomfortably familiar). But there's genuine cleverness here too: wordplay that lands, observations about human vanity and foolishness that haven't changed in three centuries. Think of it as the ancestor of every joke newsletter, every viral meme, every dog-eared paperback in the airport bookstore. It is a time capsule of what made people laugh when laughter required gathering in taverns andlehouses. For anyone curious about the long, strange history of trying to make strangers chuckle.