Elephant joke

An elephant joke is a joke, almost always an absurd riddle or conundrum and often a sequence of such, that involves an elephant. Elephant jokes were a fad in the 1960s, with many people constructing large numbers of them according to a set formula. Sometimes they involve parodies or puns.

Eight examples of elephant jokes are:

In 1960, L.M. Becker Co of Appleton, Wisconsin, released a set of 50 trading cards titled "Elephant Jokes". Elephant jokes first appeared in the United States in 1962. They were first recorded in mid-1962 in Texas, and gradually spread across the US, reaching California in early 1963. By July 1963, elephant jokes were ubiquitous and could be found in newspaper columns, and in Time and Seventeen magazines, with millions of people working to construct more jokes according to the same formula.

Both elephant jokes and Tom Swifties were in vogue in 1963, and were reported in the US national press. While the appeal of Tom Swifties was to literate adults, and gradually faded over subsequent decades, the appeal of elephant jokes was mainly to children, and has lasted. Elephant jokes began circulation primarily among schoolchildren, and have been discovered afresh by subsequent generations of children, remaining, in Isaac Asimov's words "favorites of youngsters and of unsophisticated adults".

Asimov discusses one particular elephant joke that he states is notable for the exceptional sophistication of its humor. The joke was told in the aftermath of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, who had walked into Dallas police headquarters carrying a gun, and, in Asimov's words, while still maintaining the absurdity necessary for elephant jokes "carried a quick overtone of chill rationality":

Elephant jokes rely upon absurdity and incongruity for their humor, and a contrast with the normal presumptions of knowledge about elephants. They rely upon absurdist reasoning such as that it would be the relatively incidental evidence regarding the smell of an elephant's breath or the presence of footprints in the butter that would allow for the detection of an elephant in one's bathtub or refrigerator. One key to the construction of an elephant joke is that the joke answers are somewhat appropriate if one merely overlooks the obvious absurdities inherent to the questions. If elephants were capable of climbing trees and if painting an elephant's toenails was an effective camouflage mechanism, then red would be the appropriate color for a cherry tree. If the common connotation that questions requesting the time are expected to be answered in terms of hours and minutes is ignored, then by the implied destruction of one's fence from being sat on by an elephant, it would be time to build a new fence. The appropriateness of the answer, when accounting for the absurd incongruences existing between the implied premise of the question and the normal assumptions said question invokes, distinguishes elephant jokes as jokes rather than nonsensical riddles.

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