Making puns about Sisyphus is an everlasting task, set to be rolled out again and again for eternity.
Folks on Twitter have been turning to Greek mythology and epic tales of late for some truly Olympic puns, mainly about the ill-fated Sisyphus, but also featuring every other goddess, god, titan, hero, and doomed human you could think of from the legends and stories of ancient Greece.
In case you slept through the class or Stephen Fry’s audiobook of Mythos (how could you!?), Sisyphus was a king of Corinth whose cunning deception of Death led to an eternal daily punishment of rolling a great stone up a hill in the afterlife, only to have it roll down again every time.
This classic tale and the rest of the legendary gang all get their moment in — or way too close to — the sun in this wonderfully nerdy online trend, including the likes of Prometheus (titan who created humans, then stole fire and gave it to said humans, punished for eternity by a Zeus-y eagle who pecks out his liver daily, fun!), Odysseus (king of Ithaca, hero of Homer’s The Odyssey, takes ages to get home).
The trend seems to have stemmed from an account called Classical Studies Memes for Hellenistic Teens, which has been posting memes related to Classical Studies (Ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt etc.) for three years.
The account dropped this great Orpheus and Eurydice joke in July 2020, which seems to be at the core of the recent wave of quote retweets. (For reference, in a deal with Hades, Orpheus played his lyre to pull his love Eurydice from the underworld on the condition he didn’t look back at her — folks, he did the damn thing).
For the past 24 hours, the stream of nerdy classical jokes has been as neverending as having one of your internal organs pulverised daily by a bird of prey. Too soon, Prometheus?
Some jokes flew extremely close to the sun.
Others took all of their strength.
Some were too good to be true.
And on and on it went…
Notably, the originator of the wave, @CSMFHT, also dropped some superb new jokes of their own.
And…this absolute show-stopper.
Long live Classics jokes!
