Ah, good old “yo mama” jokes. They really are the gold standard for childhood insults, aren’t they? It makes you wonder: People have had mothers for a very long time now; surely the idea of making jokes about them isn’t new. After all, history has proven that humor hasn’t evolved as much as we’d like to think it has . And we’ve already established that the world’s oldest joke was, in fact, a fart joke (you can read more about that right here ). So what about the beloved “yo mama” joke? How far back can we trace one of those? Videos by VICE Well, for starters, we have to take into consideration that “yo mama” is a pretty modern way of phrasing things and include other variations, like “your mother,” in our search. According to some sources, the oldest known joke about one’s mother dates to about 1500 BCE . The joke is attributed to a Babylonian student, who inscribed it on a tablet that was discovered in Iraq in 1976. Here’s what survives of it: “…of your mother is by the one who has intercourse with her.…