Origin of a Joke

We have all heard it a million times. When anyone starts to use it we could all finish the rest of the story with out hearing another word. It was funny the first 20 or so times that I heard it but now it is kind of just there. I am talking about the joke that people tell about when they were younger. You know, the one that goes like this, “When I was a kid I walked to school in the snow, uphill, both ways.” I have never thought much about the origin of this saying until the other night. I was watching Bill Cosby’s stand up in “Bill Cosby Himself”.

I heard him speaking about his father and I knew when the line was coming. He threw it out there and he got a better reaction from the crowd than I thought he would. This led me to think, “Hmmm, I wonder if that was the first time that joke was ever told.” It got a larger reaction than I, or a crowd of a thousand of me would have given it. I am going to stake the claim that Bill Cosby was the man that invented the “uphill both ways” joke in 1983. I have no evidence to suggest that it ever existed before him.

If anyone has any solid evidence as to the origin of this joke bring it forth and we will get to the bottom of this.