The Sumerian Bar Joke is widely considered the world’s oldest recorded 'walks into a bar' joke, dating back to approximately 1800 BC. Discovered on a clay tablet in modern-day Iraq, the joke describes a dog entering a tavern and saying, 'I cannot see a thing. I’ll open this one.' While the punchline's exact meaning is still debated by scholars—potentially involving a pun on a 'dark' tavern or an ancient cultural nuance lost to time—it has found a new life on the internet as a high-brow history meme. It is typically used to celebrate (or poke fun at) the absurdity of ancient humor and the shared human experience of telling bad jokes across four millennia.