Roman jokes
Ancient Roman jokes, as described by Cicero and Quintilian, are best employed as a rhetorical device. Many of them are apparently taken from real-life trials conducted by famous advocates, such as Cicero. Jokes were also found scrawled upon washroom walls of Pompeii as graffiti. Romans sought laughter by attending comic plays (such as those of Plautus), and mimes (such as those of Publilius Syrus). Jokes from these sources usually depended on sexual themes. Cicero believe that humour ought to be based upon "ambiguity, the unexpected, wordplay, understatement, irony, ridicule, silliness, and pratfalls". Roman jokes also depended on  certain stock characters and stereotypes, especially regarding foreigners -- as can be seen within Plautus' Poenulus. Roman culture, which was heavily influenced by the Greeks, had also been in conversation with Greek humour. Examples. One of the oldest Roman jokes, which is based on a fictitious story and survived alive to this time, is told by Macrobius in his "Saturnalia": (4th century AD, but the joke itself is probably several centuries older): (The modern version is that an aristocrat, having met his exact double, asks: "Was your mother a housemaid in our palace?" "No, my father was a gardener there"). An  example of a joke based on double meaning is recorded in Gellius (2nd century AD): (the pun is in the expression used for "in all your honesty" - orig. "ex animi tui sententia", typically used in oaths - which can also be understood as "to your liking"). Some of the jokes are about fortune-tellers and the like. An example (1st century BC):