Knock-knock jokes may have originated in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.”

Modern English wouldn’t be the same without William Shakespeare. Thanks to the Bard’s plays and sonnets, more than 1,700 words have been added to our language. But Shakespeare did more than just spice up the dictionary; he may also have invented one of the world’s greatest (or worst) comedy setups — the knock-knock joke. Strangely, the joke isn’t found in one of Shakespeare’s masterful comedies. Instead, it’s embedded within one of his darkest, most intense works. 

Shakespeare wrote the first “Yo Mama” joke.

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While the Bard did include a “maternal insult” joke in his play “Titus Andronicus,” a Babylonian student etched the first known “Yo Mama” joke on a tablet 3,500 years ago. The damaged tablet was deciphered in 2012, but sadly the punchline has been lost to history.

The beginning of Act 2, Scene 3 of Macbeth, after the tortured title character has just killed King Duncan, is known as the “porter scene.” It opens with a drunken porter (or gatekeeper) at Macbeth’s castle hearing a distant knock, pretending to be the porter of “hell-gate,” and saying, “Knock, knock, knock, who’s there?” Adding a bit of comic relief, the porter imagines the arrival of a farmer, an equivocator, and a tailor, using the same “knock-knock” construction each time. Although there’s none of the eye-rolling wordplay central to the modern knock-knock joke, this is the first known reference to a “knock, knock/who’s there” sentence structure in the context of comic relief. Yet it wasn’t until the 1930s that the modern knock-knock joke really caught on, as a reassuringly predictable form of comedy during the Great Depression. In other words, across its 400-year history, it seems the knock-knock joke has a knack for bringing levity to dark times. 

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