I couldn't come up with an appropriate Sid Ceasar pun for the title of this post

Via Sullivan, it turns out that at least some ancient Romans were fairly competent jokesters, as evidenced by a recently discovered 1,600 year old joke book:

Another "identity" joke sees a man meet an acquaintance and say "it's funny, I was told you were dead". He says "well, you can see I'm still alive." But the first man disputes this on the grounds that "the man who told me you were dead is much more reliable than you".

That Philogelos. What a cutup.