I have a complaint about my dad.

It's sad when the child complains about his only father, isn't it?  You'd think the warmth and love he gave you growing up would have been enough to override such petty things.  Still, special circumstances call for, well, special circumstances, and this is such a case.  Here is my complaint:

My father told a really old joke.

Now, there are certainly different grades of 'old joke'.  Someone tells you a joke you heard the day before, you let out a big laugh like it's the first time you've heard it, just to be polite.

You hear a joke you heard two weeks before, laugh softly, and say, "Yeah, that's a good one."

You hear a joke that you heard twenty years ago and comment on the timelessness of some jokes.

You hear a joke you heard when you were a child, and you actually don't know what to say, it's that old.

But my father's joke was even older than that.

First, here's the joke he told:  Mormon Interview

And a pretty good joke, for all that, making an excellent point about the hypocrisy of certain religious beliefs.  In one religion, a dancing woman accidentally exposes her shoulder and she's stoned to death.  In the next religion, it's okay if you have six wives and everybody runs around naked all day long — as long as you don't do any dancing.  Sheesh.
 

A number of years ago there were two 'Christopher Columbus' movies that came out around the same time.  I don't remember which one it was, but there was a scene in one of them that took place down below decks between two swarthy mates.  They were laughing and drinking grog, and one of them made a comment about how nice it was to be leaving the Calvinists back in England, the uptight Mormons of their day.

The other laughs and recalls the punch line to their favorite joke,

"Yeah, the Calvinists...'too much like dancing'!  Har-har!"

In other words, this same joke was around in 1492.

My dad told a joke that was over five hundred years old!