Philogelos

He who knows one's own limitations also knows that those limitations do exist. If he is gifted with goodwill, he can try and exceed them.
I don't think I am extremely “brilliant”: I am more an introverted and more prone to deep meditation than to laughter. My grandpa, who was a writer in Neapolitan language as a hobby, was gifted with a precious comedian style, infinitely stronger than mine! Yet, while writing Neapolis - The Siren's Recall, I felt the desperate need of that very comedian style.
Why?, one might ask. Can one find hilarious moments in a story as violent as the one a siege?
As a matter of facts, the Neapolitan spirit could find any moment good for laughter.
And I had a problem: I wanted to imbue that spirit in the story I wanted to tell, but I missed that very spirit. What to do?
Happily, humour is not something invented today or yesterday: people is laughing since ages, some even believe that humor, not language, nor erect stature, not sociability, not the ability to perform some special task, the distinguishing trait of human intelligence. So, was it possible that in ancient times there was no jokes' collection?
I had serious reasons for such an odd question: humour has a huge lot to do with the language and the culture expressing it (jokes are one of the hardest things to translate not only for the language implications, but also for the cultural ones). It is not by chance that, in our globalised world we still speak of “English humour”, pundits, and so on.
Today we have this wonderful tool, the Internet, that allows us researching in ways unthinkable just thirty years ago in the best libraries in the world. My search led me to a special essay: the Philogelos.
It is the most ancient collection of jokes, comic anecdotes and puns known, and it collects fragments across a large span of time. Though as a whole it is dated to the V-VI  century AD, many fragments in it belong to much earlier time and, by their topics, one can imagine that some of them can be attributed to the time told in Neapolis - The Siren's Recall.
Here come the links to the two versions of the text I accessed (though in different forms). The first one is the original text in Greek that naturally, given my little knowledge of Greek, I can only access as a reference. The second one is an English translation, I feel more comfortable with.
I sincerely hope reading the text will meet your liking, I found it both instructive and, at the same time, exhilarating (well, wasn't it supposed to be just like that?