A joke is a display of humour in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and is usually not meant to be interpreted literally. It usually takes
Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton enjoying a joke
The Westcar Papyrus, dating to c. 1600 BC, contains an example of one of the earliest surviving jokes.
1597 engraving of Poggio Bracciolini, author of one of the first joke anthologies
Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.
A bar joke is a type of joke cycle that usually begins with some variant of the line "A man walks into a bar..."
A priest, a rabbi, a minister and a duck walk into a bar...