are there any known ancient egyptian jokes? sorry if that's a stupid question.

It’s not a stupid question! 

There are many known Ancient Egyptian jokes and puns, just the reason you don’t hear of them is that they require a lot of background cultural and linguistic knowledge for someone in the present day to a) get the joke and b) understand why it’s funny. Their jokes are very involved sometimes, often making words that sound the same as a pun in a sentence, but if you don’t know that those two words have the same consonantal value (i.e. two words both sound like ankh) then it doesn’t make any sense.

So let’s start with an easy one. This one is from the Instruction of Ankhsheshonq, and is a Ptolemaic text (c.100-30BC) that sets out maxims/proverbs for the way one should live their life through a fictional narrative, as do many older Sebayat texts, but largely strikes a far more humorous tone:

“If a crocodile loves a donkey it puts on a wig.“ (page 24, line 7)

An instruction about how someone dangerous will disguise themselves in order to get close to someone, but gives the humorous image of a crocodile in a wig.

“Man is even more eager to copulate than a donkey; his purse is what restrains him.” (page 24, line 10)

The ancient Egyptian version of ‘dating is expensive’, but also refers to men being hornier than donkeys and unable to do much about it. 

You can have this one from Late Ramesside Letter no.46 (c.1095 BC) between a unknown family members:

“I say every single day to Amun Re Harakhty when he rises and sets, ‘Give you
life, prosperity and health, long life and great and good old age, and very many favours in the presence of Amun, your lord" As follows: I heard that you are angry. You have cause me to swell up with insults, on account of this joke which I told the chief taxing-master in this letter, when it was Henuttawy who suggested to me, “Tell some jokes to the chief taxing-master in your letter.” You are like the story about the woman blind in one eye who was in a man’s house for 20 years and he found another one, and he said to her, I will divorce you, for you are blind in one eye,” so the story goes, and she said to him, “Is this the discovery you’ve made during the 20 years I’ve spent in your house?” Such am I; such is the joke I have played on you”

The joke here is two fold; one in the original joke for the man pretending to only notice his wife was blind in one eye when it was convenient for him, and two the second implied joke that the recipient is as foolish as the man in the story for conveniently ruining his relative’s time with the chief taxing master.

Then you have the much more involved jokes, which often occur in ‘magical’ or religious texts, that require more explanation than I’ve just given for the ones above. Take some examples from the Chester Beatty Dream Book, which is a document that was supposed to help the Egyptians interpret their dreams:

If a man is eating the flesh of a donkey (aA.t): Good. (It means) he will become great (aA.t)“ (recto 2, line 21)

If white bread (HD) is given to him: Good. (It means) something at which his face will light up (HD) (recto 3, line 4)

If a man is seeing his penis stiffen (nxt): Bad. (It means) the stiffening of his enemy (nxt) (recto 8, line 2)

All three of these are linguistic puns, which, without the use of the transliteration in brackets, most people wouldn’t know were even puns. Here you can see Donkey (aA.t) and Great (aA.t) (pronounced ah-aht) being juxtaposed as a aural/visual pun because both words sound the same and are spelt the same (donkey has the added ‘donkey’ determinative, but essentially they are the same word). Same goes for HD (hedj), because it’s a pun on HD meaning silver/white/light, so the white (HD) of the bread will light (HD) up his face, and nxt (nekhet - stiffen) can also mean strength, which means as your virility increases so does the strength of the enemy. Basically, don’t fuck too much or your enemy gets stronger. 

The problem with interpreting puns such as this, is that there’s a massive cultural gap between us and the Ancient Egyptians. This means that some of what the Egyptians intended with these puns is now largely lost to us and forcing our own understanding onto the texts distorts it from the original intent, thus we can only really give surface interpretations. This is why, although there are more puns, I’m not going to show them here, as they’d require more knowledge about Ancient Egyptian culture and linguistics than is feasibly possible to write about in a blog post. But I hope I’ve at least enabled you to see how the Egyptians went about jokes and puns.