Punjabi humour is loud, physical, obscene and largely at somebody's expense, usually the speaker's own family or community.
The Sardar joke, a genre of Indian jokes in which a Sikh is stupid, has been current across India for decades. Punjabis tell them too and a number of Sikhs have objected to them and one petition to ban them reached the Supreme Court in 2015, which declined to.
There is a longer tradition beneath that: the naqqal and bhand performers whose whole trade was mockery of the powerful, the sithniyan sung at weddings, the boliyan of the giddha, and the insult forms of ordinary Punjabi speech which are elaborate and affectionate.
Punjabi is a language with an unusually large vocabulary for abuse and a social convention that abuse between intimates is a form of warmth.
None of this survives translation and almost none of it has been collected, which means the funniest thing about Punjab is invisible to anyone who does not speak it.
The Punjabi joke runs on exaggeration, on the deadpan reply, and on the type: the neighbour, the mother-in-law, the man just back from Canada.
The sardar joke is a genre in Hindi rather than in Punjabi. It works by making Punjabis the fools of somebody else's story, which Punjabis then tell about themselves.
The joke told in Punjabi is usually about status and pretension, and it is far sharper than anything that survives translation.