>>39079
There are many types of humour and many uses. People joke l'art pour l'art (I do it here often, just because I find something funny and don't care if others do or not, but it won't disturb me if they do), or people joke for social acceptance, etc.
Judging humour in the past isn't easy. We lack the context that made things humorous. This causes problems to historians, back in the day, like 19th century and first half of 20th, they concentrated lot on the events. What happened back then? But since then scientists interested more in answering the question "how did they live". And homour was part of their daily life just as now. And there are researchers who explore the humour of the people of the past. They find it's hard to pinpoint jokes due to lack of context which otherwise had to be obvious for the people of that era. They suspect many of the sources that are/were used to write the story of the events contain quite a few jokes and japes, and shouldn't be taken seriously.