A LEGENDARY East Lancashire comedian has brought a 1,500-year-old joke book back to life and proved that the old ones are still the best.

Jim Bowen, who was born in Padiham and went to school in Accrington, performed jokes from ‘Philogelos: The Laugh Addict’ at a London comedy club earlier this year and brought the 4th Century gags back to life.

Click on play below to watch the video

The translation from Greek was done by William Berg, an American professor of classics, and it fell to Jim, the presenter of cult ‘80s dart show Bullseye, to breath new life into the previously extinct jokes.

Blackburn Rovers fan Jim said: "One or two of them are jokes I've seen in people's acts nowadays, just slightly updated. "They put in a motor car instead of a chariot now. "Some of them are Tommy Cooper-esque.

"Bob Monkhouse once said to me, 'There are two kinds of comedian: The man who tells funny stories and the funny man who tells stories. The funny man who tells stories will long outlive the man who tells funny stories’."

The 265 jokes have been published as an e-book and even contain an ancient version of the Monty Python’s famous dead parrot sketch.

In the Greek example a man goes up to a student dunce and says: “The slave you sold me died. Made you do it?"

“By the gods,” counters the dunce, “when he was with me, he never did any such thing!”

By the law of the time, the seller of a slave was liable for damages if a slave turned out to be faulty in the same way that Michael Palin’s pet shop owner in the Monty Python sketch was liable for the dead parrot.

Bowen’s involvement in the performance came about when Richard Stephenson, chief executive of YUDU, thought he was the perfect comedian to make the gags super, smashing, great, "Bowen is a British comedy great", added Stephenson.

During the gig Jim runs through the jokes which include one liners on flatulence, sex, ugly wives and idiots.

The 265 jokes in Philogelos are attributed to a pair of Greek jokers called Hierocles and Philagrius.

To download the e-book, click on the link below.