A man bought a slave who died soon after. When he complained, the slave seller replied: "Well, he didn't die when I owned him." Fast forward 1,800 years and the ideas behind many modern jokes can be traced back to the basic principles instigated by the Romans. In fact, take a trip on a cruise ship and you'll hear the resident entertainer still telling many of the original gags. Meanwhile new jokes are constantly evolving. The cult of celebrity has brought about numerous jokes at the expense of the rich and famous while the fallout from the recession has meant that bankers have temporarily replaced lawyers as the people we most love to hate. Politicians come and go, but while comics have struggled to invent material on Barack Obama, happily there are still a few new George W. Bush jokes because where humorists are concerned, even though he is no longer in office, Dubya is the gift that just keeps on giving. The vast majority of jokes in this book are brand new with the occasional classic thrown in, including the one about two nuns in a bath. I confess to having no idea how old that particular gem is. Who knows, it might originally have been a Roman bath. Geoff Tibballs, 2009 ACCIDENTS