Lonely and isolated from the other kids at school, I yearned for a world where people laughed regularly and happily. Was I imagining their happiness? Desperation drove my laughter, not delight. When I finally encountered Percy Shelley’s assertion that “Our sincerest laughter / With some pain is fraught,” I knew what he meant because I had lived it. If my stunts ended with visiting the principal, being paddled, writing a hundred times that I would not talk in class, or standing at the blackboard on tiptoe for an hour with my nose pressed against a wad of gum I’d been chewing—though I’ve never liked gum and chewed it only because it was forbidden—the punishments didn’t bother me much. They were just the cost of doing business. I stopped my stunts because, as we got a little older, the other kids stopped laughing. What used to be funny no longer was. I was moving in their minds from “odd guy” to something approaching “jerk.” I wanted to stop before I got there.
At least one teacher thought I had already gone to “jerk” and beyond. In the fifth grade, playing kickball at recess, I caught a popup and hurled the big rubber ball toward a tall girl named Michelle, who had edged off first base. My throw caught her flush on the side of her head, knocking her glasses off. Her face looked naked without her glasses, and she seemed nearly featureless.
Double play! Game over! I was thrilled. It was just like the miracle endings I’d read about in sports novels, where the no-talent kid suddenly leads the Hogansville Cougars to the state championship of an unspecified state. So I was dumbstruck when Mrs. Thompkins dashed across the asphalt, grabbed me by my upper arm, and shouted into my face that I was a vicious little brat and she was going to keep me after school and call my mother. I was in more trouble than I’d ever dreamed of. She’d see to that.
It was against the rules, she said, to aim the kickball at someone’s head. I’d done it deliberately. I was just mean.
That rule was news to me (and to everyone else, I believe). I was astonished at the accusation and flattered that she thought I was athletic enough to drill the ball from third base and hit a moving human head on purpose. I wished I were that good. I’d been aiming vaguely at a spot between her and first base, and had simply thrown the ball as hard and high as I could to get it there. I was so flabbergasted that I didn’t even think to defend myself, and it took me another moment or two to understand that her accusation wasn’t even the main point. This mishap was her excuse to punish me for screaming in class, rolling on the floor, throwing my book.
I was shocked to realize she didn’t like me. I was a kid. Adults weren’t allowed to dislike kids. None of the stupid stunts I’d pulled in class had anything to do with her. She was just there—an authority figure, a role not a person, a face I could throw myself at as if I were a cream pie in a Three Stooges movie. It never crossed my mind that what I did in class could ruffle her. We were both diminished by this new understanding. I was distressed to realize that the next time I did something stupid for a laugh that I wouldn’t just be exploiting the role she played but also hurting a fellow human being. I saw myself as at worst mischievous but still innocent. My teacher, and maybe others—the principal, my classmates—saw me as a brat, a creep: someone who enjoyed being aggravating. For many days afterward, I lay on my bed after school and studied the overhead light, troubled by the difference between how I saw myself and how others perceived me.
Some military brats react to perpetual dislocation by becoming socially adept, at ease with new situations and new people. I was not of their company. I was one of the ones who withdrew into themselves as my family moved from Fort Hood, Texas, where I was born, to New Mexico, England, Ohio, North Carolina, California, France, and Alabama. Always being the new guy, the person learning the new rules and the new pecking order, wore me out.
After my father was transferred from North Carolina to San Bernardino, California, my family lived off base, “on the economy,” as the military said, and I was suddenly attending Del Rosa Elementary with kids who mocked my southern accent, especially the over-enunciated way I’d been taught to say “the” with a biblical long e sound, like thee, while they used the casual and, I thought, rudely dismissive, short e: thuh. The most searing expression of contempt in my sixth-grade class was “farmer,” and every time I opened my mouth, I revealed myself as a farmer, which I had up to that year thought a noble profession. “How could we eat without farmers?” my teachers in North Carolina had asked, though North Carolina’s most famous and lucrative agricultural product was tobacco and the only field trips we took, other than to the Coca-Cola bottler, were to tobacco auctions and curing barns.
At Del Rosa Elementary when baseball teams were selected, the captains usually walked off with their players and left me standing alone on the playground, unselected. I was astoundingly uncoordinated, perhaps as the result of being born prematurely—that’s what my mother thought. I was useless at sports. I retreated to the green bench beside our classroom and to my books with despair and relief.
One morning, over the top of my book, I saw a teacher walking across the asphalt toward the green bench. Sensing the purpose in her stride, I pretended to concentrate on my book while glancing at the ground, looking for her feet to come into view. Boys were not allowed not to play games. I’d been breaking the rules and now I’d been caught.
“Get your nose out of that book and go play with the other kids,” she said. It was meant as gruff kindness, but what did she expect me to do?
I wandered down to the swing sets, because no one was there, sat on a swing and swung back and forth desultorily. She was watching me. I swung, cried a little, and sniffled until recess was over, then lined up with the rest of the kids and filed back into the classroom. The next day I took my book back to my spot. The teacher who had rousted me the day before glanced in my direction once or twice, but I could see she’d given up.
Like most adults, including my parents, she was probably reluctant to stop a boy from reading, a reverence I counted on to get out of things I didn’t want to do. I let them think reading was work, learning, ambition—though it was always pleasure and only incidentally edifying. As soon as I could read, I retreated into books for the comfort of worlds that were comprehensible. I might not understand everything in the book I was reading, but I could understand the arc of the story. This was not true in life, which had no arc I could see. Books told me why people did what they did. In life, my parents’ and my teachers’ thoughts were a mystery, and most of what they did, kind or callous, a surprise. Books gave me an illusion of order, and step by slow step they taught me how to interpret what I saw: to see that the coach’s crispness didn’t mean he disliked me but considered me irrelevant; that the tightness of the lunch lady’s lips meant she didn’t like smacking food onto plastic trays for a living; that Mrs. Porter’s constant anger, though often triggered by a student whispering in class, really came from somewhere else; that Mr. Alvin’s long stories about serving in Korea meant he was bored to stupefaction after twenty years of teaching fractions and he really didn’t much care anymore if we learned them or not. Books helped me understand that Mrs. Thompkins, who thought I was mean, was an easily frazzled woman and that only some of her rage against me was caused by what I’d done.
Soon after we moved to California, I discovered books in the library by the great comedians of my parents’ generation: Fred Allen, Sam Levenson, Steve Allen, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, and Jack Paar. I was astounded that men my father’s age could tell jokes one after the other, mock themselves, and treat their dignity as something to cast away and then pull back like a yo-yo. They turned their sense of self into a toy and played with it. These comedians didn’t see their self-respect as a bulwark against the world. They used humor to clear some ground in the world for them to stand on, a trick I wanted to 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 quickly as 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. 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 Hanco
ck 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.
The Joker: A Memoir Page 5