[dkurth]

Re: the age of "That's what she said":

I thumbed through The Frogs (Aristophanes) at a used book store once. This play was written circa 400 BC. In the prologue, one character is offering to entertain the audience with a few jokes, and another character says, "Yes, but not 'That's what she said.'" The joke was too over-used.

I was astounded to think that the joke was that old! But it's actually not. The old jokes of ancient Athenians were a little too obscure, I guess, so the translator picked a modern example. Still, that translation of The Frogs is from the 1950s, so the joke was old at least that far back. (Here is the translation: https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.65406/2015.6540...)

[shagie]

I looked up some other translations...

1908 - "Not "Oh, my poor blisters!" - https://archive.org/details/frogstranslatedi00arisuoft/page/...

1995 - "Anything but “What a strain!”" https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

Original greek - "πλήν γ᾽ ‘ὡς θλίβομαι.’" - https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text...

This appears to translate as "except 'as I grieve.'" according to Google Translate - https://translate.google.com/?sl=el&tl=en&text=πλήν%20γ᾽%20‘...

[thaumasiotes]

> This appears to translate as "except 'as I grieve.'" according to Google Translate

That Perseus link will give you dictionary entries for the words. Relevant glosses of ὡς appear to be "as; how; so; thus". θλίβομαι is the passive form of a verb meaning "press; squeeze" and metaphorically "oppress; afflict"; examples in the Great Scott (LSJ) show it being used to describe a shoe pinching a foot, a shoulder rubbing against a narrow doorway, lips pressing against each other in a kiss, and the circumstances of poverty making things difficult for a poor person.

So it's easy to imagine that it might feature in the punchline of a pun. But even without constructing a pun, it would be easy to translate that as something like "see how I suffer?", which could be the punchline to any number of jokes. It sounds like a good translation of the modern punchline "first world problems", for example.

[n4r9]

"What a strain" feels like quite a good translation, then. One can easily imagine a joke along the lines of...

I've been having stomach pains all week but finally managed a bowel movement this morning. What a strain!

[martopix]

I studied Aristophanes in school and read some of his plays. It's astonishing how 2000 years later, some things can still be funny.

[riquito]

that one looks more like a very liberal translation to match the present audience (see shagie comment)

[cafeinux]

Well, that's what dkurth said.