The Joker: A Memoir (7 page)

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. The joke is the focus. If people laugh, they are sharing your pleasure at the thing itself, and some of the credit washes over you too. Even if the joke tanks, people’s razzing is usually good-natured joshing, not real animosity, and it’s aimed at the joke more than the teller. I watched the listeners intently and tailored the jokes to what I saw, speeding up if they looked bored, slowing down at complicated and crucial parts of the joke, and pausing to build suspense.

Though I’d rather have been one of the boys who could smack a baseball solidly with a bat, my talent, it seemed, was telling jokes. I was fascinated with them as mechanisms—machines made of words, to use William Carlos Williams’s definition of poetry. I
tinkered with them as obsessively as other boys enjoyed taking apart radios, jack-in-the-boxes, and frogs to see what was inside. In bed at night, walking home from school, sitting in church, I sharpened the details of jokes, changing the settings, naming the characters after kids in my classes, and altering elements that had flopped the last time. I didn’t even have to try to memorize jokes. After I heard a joke, I, like an elephant, never forgot.

Other kids knew a few elephant jokes, but I knew them all. I even persuaded my mother to buy me a book of elephant jokes. I had to cash in my birthday wish to do it, and still it took some lobbying, arguing, and whining because Mom did not—emphatically
did not
—see the point in spending good money on books. That’s what the library is for.

“But, Mom, it isn’t in the library yet. I checked.”

“They’ll get it sooner or later.” She always said that. “Now, hush. You’ve got a birthday coming up and maybe we’ll see about it then.”

I still remember the cheesy black-and-white drawings of elephants with machine guns and elephants hiding in the cherry trees. I was embarrassed by the drawings. They took the jokes I was enthralled with and treated them as if they were just something dumb for kids, even though I was a kid and I loved the jokes and I knew they were stupid. But that was the point, wasn’t it? I remember asking other kids, “How do you kill a blue elephant?” They hesitated, and before they could even say, “I don’t know,” I said, “Shoot it with a blue elephant gun.” Then, quickly, “How do you kill a red elephant?” When they said, “Shoot it with a red elephant gun?” with real glee and false scorn, I screamed, “No! You squeeze its trunk till it turns blue and then shoot it with a
blue
elephant gun”—and we all cackled together.

Elephant jokes mock logic, deliberately deranging the senses of sense. They are an adolescent intellectual’s version of spinning around till you fall down. The jokes partake of surrealism, which
was famously defined by the Comte de Lautreamont as “the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” What’s gray, stands in a river when it rains, and doesn’t get wet? An elephant with an umbrella. Determinedly capricious, elephant jokes are an inside game—much funnier if only one person doesn’t know the joke and everyone else yells the answer in his face. If you ask someone why elephants can’t be policemen, the punch line is not really funny, but it’s funny to inflict your private knowledge on a listener: because they can’t hide behind billboards! I was interested in seeing who’d go along with the absurdity of the initiation into false knowledge and who twisted his lips, sneered, “That’s just stupid,” and stalked off. The rejection stings briefly, sure; but the sneerers were declaring themselves serious people, non-laughers. It’s useful to know who those people are.

Traditional riddles are difficult, but fair. But the echt elephant jokes deconstruct riddles. They are so arbitrary that you couldn’t possibly work out the answer. Their whole purpose seems to be to display your ignorance. Answering the unanswerable question for his listener, the joke teller is a teacher correcting a dim-witted student.

In school, I learned that many countries counted bauxite as their chief export without ever being told what bauxite was. Ditto milo. Flying buttresses? Doric, Ionic, and the other kind of column? “The mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell,” I wrote on test after test, wondering what it meant. Though I knew iambic pentameter was what Shakespeare wrote, I had no idea what it was, how it worked, or why I should give a flip—and I doubted the teachers knew either. Just what did Paul Revere, Molly Pitcher, Betsy Ross, Patrick Henry, Sojourner Truth, Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, Walter Winchell, and Abner Ducking Fubbleday actually
accomplish
that was so damn great? John Hancock had a cool signature that I tried to imitate for a couple of weeks in sixth grade, but Hancock’s John
Hancock seemed to be the only reason he was included on posterity’s pop quiz. Virginia Dare, Crispus Attucks, George Armstrong Custer, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and what’s-his-name Travis’s renown derived from obstructing the paths of armed men who outnumbered them. I was unimpressed with George Washington Carver’s wizardry with peanuts, whatever it was, and though I thought it was just fine that Helen Keller could spell
water
, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why that made her important.

I knew that the trivium and quadrivium—the two stages of the seven liberal arts in medieval education—were very, very important, but if I’d ever been asked what they were, I’d have had as much chance answering as I did when I was first asked how an elephant is like a banana. They are both yellow. Except for the elephant. I did love to say
twivium
and
quadwivium
, over and over again in an Elmer Fudd voice, much to the annoyance of my teachers, and long past the time when even my most easily amused friends had hardened their hearts against these particular bon mots. But it was the comic changeability of their sound that makes them stick in my head to this day, long after they’ve lost any association with grammar, logic, and rhetoric—let alone arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

The elephant riddles spoofed not just the questions the teachers asked and the whole experience of education, but thinking itself. At first, I was impressed with logic, this “thinking clearly,” which teachers and my parents made such a big honking deal about. Logic was, I first thought, like a train. Get on it and the rails would carry everyone to the same destination, and when they got there they’d see it was the only place to be. But I soon understood that, outside arithmetic class, logic was more like a taxi. You told it where to take you, and it took you there. If you were in favor of the death penalty, it found a street that led to the electric chair and nailed the accelerator to the floorboard. If you hated the death penalty, it took the same street just as fast, but in the opposite direction. Sure, I could
see that logic was useful, but it never did anything surprising. But messing with logic—thinking things that were anti-rational—now
that
lightened the leaden step of dialectics, put swan’s wings on reason’s nine-pound hammer, and made causality turn off the interstate and career down a dark dirt road with the speedo’s needle pegged into the triple digits. Why do ducks have flat feet? From stomping out forest fires. Why do elephants have flat feet? Stomping out burning ducks. A joke gets you a roller-coaster-with-a-Mobius-strip-twist thrill ride of anti-logic, ending in a laugh, because you return to where you started, but upside down. What does logic get you? A disquisition on how ducks have, over many millennia, evolved flat feet to help them swim.

At school, you learn to be a member of the group of people who know certain stuff—science, history, literature, and who Abner Doubleday was. Elephant riddles were a reductio ad absurdum of that process. You subject yourself to the joke teller’s arbitrary knowledge so others will then come to you for answers. To be superior, you first have to be subordinate. To be active, you must first be passive. The pure caprice of elephant jokes gave me the sense that we jokers were enrolled in a free-floating and oddly democratic club, and yet exclusive, too, because the jocks, hoods, and class officers, who didn’t care for the silliness we valued, excluded themselves.

If jokes were my first step out of social isolation, they were also my way out of books. My language, even by the time I was eleven, had grown bookish and artificial. The vocabularies of Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, or Sir Thomas Malory rocketed around my head and occasionally burst from my mouth. I noticed the startled look on my fifth-grade teacher’s face when I asked permission to go to the restroom because I needed to “make water,” but I didn’t know why she was startled. I suffered awkward moments before I learned that
zounds
,
nay
,
nary
,
grand
, and
bloody
were best left on the pages where I had met them. “I had nary an inkling that such a grand idea
could go so bloody cockeyed” may be a sentence I never uttered, though I did make, separately, every single gaffe in it.

A year or two later, when I was deep in the hard-boiled thrillers of Hammett, Chandler, and Ross Macdonald, it seemed natural to tell my friend that going trick-or-treating was jake with me, to inform my mother that I couldn’t go to the matinee if she didn’t give me some scratch, and to warn a Dumb Dora in my seventh-grade class I was going to smack her in the puss if she didn’t stop ragging me and vamoose—natural, that is, until I actually said them. These slips drew looks of strained forbearance, like the overly patient expressions on adults’ faces when five-year-olds explained the plot of a cartoon or when the retarded boy in my Sunday school class took off his shoes and socks and started counting to ten on his toes while the rest of us were singing. But as soon as I started telling jokes, I began paying more attention to how the kids around me talked. People drew back from you if you pitched your vocabulary too high, wound your sentences too tight, or recited a joke rotely.

I also paid attention to what the jokes were about. A joke can be told well or poorly, but it has to be
about
something. The more nervous-making the subject matter, the tighter the jack-in-the-box spring is compressed—and the more forcefully jack leaps out. So of course I liked the edgy jokes best, the ones that sidled up against the taboos that I was just becoming conscious of.

The elephant joke I thought funniest is “What’s that black stuff between an elephant’s toes?” “Slow natives.” I see now that the joke built part of its hilarity on racism, and I indistinctly sensed then that the smug superiority of an American schoolboy toward the squashed natives drove some of my laughter. The joke affirmed the naïve racism I absorbed through Tarzan and Jungle Jim movies, which I’d watched intently as a young kid. Natives run in wild panic ahead of stampeding elephants, saved only by their speed, despite having lived around elephants all their lives. At the time,
though, I focused on the black stuff between the elephants’ toes. I was a boy. Gross stuff enchanted me. At the end of almost every day with my feet bound into dark, damp shoes, I wrenched off my sneakers, peeled off my socks, and found black lines of sloughed skin between my toes.

It was filth, filth made from my body. It represented the corruption of the flesh that preachers sorrowed over in church, but it was also farcical. Toe jam fell below the solemnity of Saint Paul’s animadversions of the “works of the flesh”: “fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, luxury, witchcrafts, enmities, contentions, emulations, wraths, quarrels, dissensions, sects, envies, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such like.” But it symbolized all those uncleannesses, and if the apostle had continued “and such like, including toe jam, snot, spit, mucus, eye buggers, gnawed fingernails, peeled blisters, dingleberries, and both number one and number two,” he would have resolved some theological implications that had vexed me as a boy.