learn—and of course they made me laugh.
I practically memorized two books that came as part of a six-books-for-only-ninety-nine-cents enticement to join the Book of the Month Club: Bennett Cerf’s Bumper Crop (“His 5 biggest best-sellers, complete and unabridged in 2 volumes”) and a collection of hillbilly anecdotes called Tall Tales from the High Hills . I assume the books were my mother’s choice. Cerf’s omnibus was packed with anecdotes from a literary milieu so foreign I thought of it as Oz—skyscrapers, subways, cocktails, celebrities, and anecdotes about Ernest Hemingway’s chest hair—while the other rollicked with the thumb-in-your-eye humor of my Georgia relatives: one world was sophisticated and beckoning while the other rejected and mocked that world. Both seemed right to me. To laugh, you have to stand outside yourself and look at what is happening now as transient, passing so quicklyas to be already past—and I was scrambling toward that vantage point. In my scramble, I was assisted by elephants.
Q: What’s gray and dangerous?
A: An elephant with a machine gun.
Q: Why’d the elephant paint his toenails red?
A: So he could hide in a cherry tree.
Elephant jokes became a national craze the year I entered Del Vallejo Junior High in San Bernardino, and I was enraptured.
The first elephant joke I ever heard was almost like the first chicken joke I’d heard, the one about the chicken and its fixation on roads: How do you stop an elephant from charging? Take away his credit card. The answer is probably figure-out-able if you are alert to the double meaning of “charge.” But what about “How do you catch an elephant?” “Hide in the grass and make a noise like a peanut.” Or even sillier: “How’s an elephant different from peanut butter?” “An elephant doesn’t stick to the roof of your mouth.” The jokes are so far beyond logic—and then so far beyond rudimentary illogic!—that you have to be given the answers to know them. You have to be instructed.
When I heard kids telling these jokes, fascination got the best of my self-consciousness, and I edged into the circle to listen. I didn’t mind saying “I don’t know” to riddles even if I already knew the answers because, as the social inferior of the group, it cost me nothing to play the straight man. Another voice to swell the laughter is always welcome. The cool guy or the pretty girl may eye you for a moment, but they almost always decide that a larger audience beats a smaller one. If you laugh appreciatively, as I did, you are welcome to join and welcome to come back. Sooner or later, you get a chance to tell your own joke. The jokers want to laugh too.
In a long pause after a joke, making sure I was not jumping in front of someone else with a riddle to tell, I leaned over the outdoor lunch table and asked, “Why don’t elephants like to wear black lace panties?”
I was so nervous I could taste the fish sticks from lunch ascend to the back of my tongue before someone said, “I don’t know.”
With what I thought a raffish arching of my right eyebrow, I said, “Who says they don’t like black lace panties?” I do not remember where I had first heard the joke, but the self-mocking lasciviousness of the delivery was stolen from Johnny Carson, who had taken over as host of The Tonight Show a year or two earlier.
They laughed rich, unfeigned, unforced, give-yourself-over-to-it laughter, and though I didn’t trust the acceptance to last past the fifteen or twenty seconds of laughter, it did. I didn’t become a popular kid, but I noticed that a couple of the girls’ eyes, as they passed over me, no longer narrowed at the corners. Now, when I joined the jokers, I no longer had to work my way into the circle. The other kids scooted over and made room for me.
Joke telling was a perfect way to learn how to talk to other kids. With a joke, you get everyone’s attention without being the center of attention yourself.
I practically memorized two books that came as part of a six-books-for-only-ninety-nine-cents enticement to join the Book of the Month Club: Bennett Cerf’s Bumper Crop (“His 5 biggest best-sellers, complete and unabridged in 2 volumes”) and a collection of hillbilly anecdotes called Tall Tales from the High Hills . I assume the books were my mother’s choice. Cerf’s omnibus was packed with anecdotes from a literary milieu so foreign I thought of it as Oz—skyscrapers, subways, cocktails, celebrities, and anecdotes about Ernest Hemingway’s chest hair—while the other rollicked with the thumb-in-your-eye humor of my Georgia relatives: one world was sophisticated and beckoning while the other rejected and mocked that world. Both seemed right to me. To laugh, you have to stand outside yourself and look at what is happening now as transient, passing so quicklyas to be already past—and I was scrambling toward that vantage point. In my scramble, I was assisted by elephants.
Q: What’s gray and dangerous?
A: An elephant with a machine gun.
Q: Why’d the elephant paint his toenails red?
A: So he could hide in a cherry tree.
Elephant jokes became a national craze the year I entered Del Vallejo Junior High in San Bernardino, and I was enraptured.
The first elephant joke I ever heard was almost like the first chicken joke I’d heard, the one about the chicken and its fixation on roads: How do you stop an elephant from charging? Take away his credit card. The answer is probably figure-out-able if you are alert to the double meaning of “charge.” But what about “How do you catch an elephant?” “Hide in the grass and make a noise like a peanut.” Or even sillier: “How’s an elephant different from peanut butter?” “An elephant doesn’t stick to the roof of your mouth.” The jokes are so far beyond logic—and then so far beyond rudimentary illogic!—that you have to be given the answers to know them. You have to be instructed.
When I heard kids telling these jokes, fascination got the best of my self-consciousness, and I edged into the circle to listen. I didn’t mind saying “I don’t know” to riddles even if I already knew the answers because, as the social inferior of the group, it cost me nothing to play the straight man. Another voice to swell the laughter is always welcome. The cool guy or the pretty girl may eye you for a moment, but they almost always decide that a larger audience beats a smaller one. If you laugh appreciatively, as I did, you are welcome to join and welcome to come back. Sooner or later, you get a chance to tell your own joke. The jokers want to laugh too.
In a long pause after a joke, making sure I was not jumping in front of someone else with a riddle to tell, I leaned over the outdoor lunch table and asked, “Why don’t elephants like to wear black lace panties?”
I was so nervous I could taste the fish sticks from lunch ascend to the back of my tongue before someone said, “I don’t know.”
With what I thought a raffish arching of my right eyebrow, I said, “Who says they don’t like black lace panties?” I do not remember where I had first heard the joke, but the self-mocking lasciviousness of the delivery was stolen from Johnny Carson, who had taken over as host of The Tonight Show a year or two earlier.
They laughed rich, unfeigned, unforced, give-yourself-over-to-it laughter, and though I didn’t trust the acceptance to last past the fifteen or twenty seconds of laughter, it did. I didn’t become a popular kid, but I noticed that a couple of the girls’ eyes, as they passed over me, no longer narrowed at the corners. Now, when I joined the jokers, I no longer had to work my way into the circle. The other kids scooted over and made room for me.
Joke telling was a perfect way to learn how to talk to other kids. With a joke, you get everyone’s attention without being the center of attention yourself.
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