Andrew Hudgins

Helen Keller
Answers the Iron
Though I’d rather have been one of the boys who could smack a base-
ball solidly with a bat, my talent was telling jokes. I was fascinated in
them as mechanisms — machines made of words, to use William
Carlos Williams’s definition of poetry. I tinkered with them as obses-
sively 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 alter-
ing 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
convinced 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 ele-
phants 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 ele-
phant 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 Lautréamont 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 to see 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 them-
selves serious people, nonlaughers. It’s useful to know who those peo-
ple are.

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