A funny thing happened on the way to my sixty-third…
by Maurice O’Scanaill
There have been endless discussions and seminars about humour and what makes us laugh and why, and these must be the driest, most boring and self-defeating gatherings in the world. Once you start dissecting anything… I mean, before you cut it up into little pieces you have to kill it, right? It’s a bit like having compulsory blood-tests, CAT scans and X-rays at a beauty contest.
I suppose it’s possible to work out why a particular joke is funny; it may be the unexpected ending, the fact that it’s a perfect example of some quirk in us as a species or as individuals, the suddenness of it, but then there are hilarious jokes that don’t tick any of these boxes.
Sometime in the sixties, we had a year or so of Elephant jokes and these were, for the most part, silly in the extreme. At least, they look silly from fifty years on, but I remember being convulsed with laughter for hours on end as, one after the other, the latest Elephant joke was trotted out. Even now, when I meet friends from those times, it isn’t unusual to begin a conversation with a reminder: ‘How would you know that there was an elephant in your bed?’ (‘You’d see the E on his pyjamas.’) Or ‘How would you know there was an elephant in the fridge?’ (You’d see his footprints in the jelly.’) Or ‘Why can’t an elephant pass through a keyhole?’ (‘You know that little knot on the end of his tail…?’) See what I mean? Very, very silly. And yet…
Unless we stop at that, just as the chuckle-wave is beginning to well up, we may find ourselves moving on to the far more sophisticated double- or triple-deckers. ‘Why did the elephant paint his toenails red?’ (‘So that when he was hiding in a cherry tree, he couldn’t be seen.’) ‘Have you ever seen an elephant in a cherry tree? No? (‘Just goes to show how good the disguise is.’) Or, my favourite: ‘Why are elephants grey?’ (‘To distinguish them from strawberries, which are red.’) ‘What did Hannibal say when he saw the elephants crossing the Alps?’ (‘Here come the elephants.’) ‘And what did his granny say?’ (‘Here come the strawberries. The poor woman was colour blind.’)
Don’t ask me where they came from but they’re so off-the-wall that they may have come from the pot-fuelled brains of the hippies of Haight-Ashbury; there’s that flower-power feel to elephant jokes, like, whatever, man, far out. I remember trying them on my own children in the seventies as we drove along – after we got tired of road sums (seeing who could add up the digits on the number plates of oncoming cars the fastest) or I Spy – and, after their initial perplexity, and the first few jokes, they, too, would begin to laugh, but I never quite worked out whether it was because they thought the jokes were funny or because they thought the fact that I thought they were funny was what was funny.
As any good raconteur will tell you, jokes come in clusters. One leads on to the next. They may be racist, sexist, blondist, ageist, and every other ‘ist’ you can think of, but should never be avoided because of that, not unless the teller knows that there is someone listening who might be offended or upset; only an insensitive boor would tell one of the hilarious Alzheimers jokes to someone with a beloved parent suffering from the dread disease. Jokes may be filthy, but as long as it’s not gratuitous filth, and your granny (the non colour-blind one) isn’t listening, then so what? Political Correctness gone mad is the enemy of free speech, and especially of jokes. And I’ve always had difficulty in understanding PC anyway – why go to the bother of describing a fat guy like me as a ‘gravitationally challenged person’ when all it conjures up in the listener’s mind is: ‘fat guy.’
There are those who can tell jokes well and those who can’t – and there’s even a joke about that. In fact there are many, but this is a good one – and it’s got two endings! A young fellow ends up in gaol and, on the very first night, just after lights out, as he’s lying depressed on the bottom bunk, a voice calls out somewhere: ‘Thirty-seven!’ There’s a bit of a giggle all over the cell block. Then another voice calls out: ‘Eighty-three!’ and there’s a bigger giggle. Over the next ten minutes the laughter gets louder and louder as more and more numbers are called out. Eventually the newcomer manages to get his cellmate to stop laughing long enough to explain. ‘There’s a joke book in the prison library,’ he says, ‘and to save time, we just call out the joke number, because we all know the book backwards.’ Fascinated, the young lad asks if he can have a go. ‘Sure!’ says the old lag. ‘Go for it.’
So the young lad calls out: ‘Ninety-two?’ And waits. [Now here’s where the two endings come in.] Ending #1: There’s dead silence and, disappointed, he asks the old lag why. ‘Listen, kid,’ he says kindly, ‘there’s nothing wrong with the joke as such – it’s just the way you tell it.’ Ending #2: The place howls with laughter; people are falling out of their bunks, helpless, and it goes on and on and on. Eventually, when it subsides, the youngster says excitedly: ‘WhatdidIsay? WhatdidIsay?’ And the old lag, with tears rolling down his cheeks says: ‘That’s one we haven’t heard before!’
Go figure. Actually, don’t bother – just be glad it’s there.
