A summary of the evolution of jokes in Persian in the last millennium

One thing that any language provides for the speakers of every nation and society is humour. Humour and jokes are amongst the unique characteristics and features of any nation and its language. The type of jokes considering structure and content differ from one society to another. Also, even within one society, jokes differ from one era to another. Jokes in Persian have seen great changes since the past to present day and these changes have been both in structure and content. In this study, Persian jokes have been investigated from the very first cases of about a thousand years ago to the very present ones, considering their structural and conceptual features. As a result, Persian jokes were categorized into three generations: first generation (the old-fashioned stories), second generation (the patterns), and third generation (the new version). In the end, it was observed that jokes in Persian have gone through the right path over the passage of time.