Under the Button is part of a student-run nonprofit.

Please support us by disabling your ad blocker on our site.

Penn's Sumerian Tablets Rival Oz For Worst Jokes Of 2016

A collection of Sumerian clay tablets at the Penn Museum was just translated and they put Donald Trump’s tweets to shame. Penn students have been rejoicing as they frantically delete drunk selfies to make room on their devices for this sick new mixtape. While it’s not Taylor Swift’s secret album, it’s even better (plus it might actually be on Spotify). In celebration of the harvest, the Sumerians invented a celebration that would put the American practice of massacring Native Americans to shame – they wrote hypothetical (or not?) arguments between farm tools. The plow and the hoe go at it in a series of exchanges as intense as the 2016 Republican primary debates. Check out this hilarious excerpt:

Plow: “Oh, the hoe. Tied together with thongs. Made from poplar, tooth, and ash. Oh, hoe, with your poor little head stuck in the mud, weeding miserably with your crooked teeth in the muck.”

Hoe: “You only work four months of the year, and the rest of the time you’re loafing in the shed.”

The Sumerian people are known as the first to cultivate opium, or as they called it, the “joy plant,” so we expect that hallucination may have been involved. Although the rest of the transcript has yet to be released, we expect it to match the joke-writing skills of Oz. The performance, entitled “Sumer Redux,” premiered this past Sunday. If you went, please email reviews to tips@underthebutton.com.

PennConnects