Elephant Joke - Symbolism

Symbolism

Elephant jokes are seen by many commentators as symbolic of the culture of the United States and the UK in the 1960s. Elliot Oring notes that elephant jokes dismiss conventional questions and answers, repudiate established wisdom, and reject the authority of traditional knowledge. He draws a parallel between this and the counterculture of the 1960s, stating that "disestablishment was the purpose of both," pointing to the sexual revolution and noting that "erhaps it was no accident that many of the elephant jokes emphasized the intrusion of sex into the most innocuous areas."

Abrahams and Dundes, in their paper On elephantasy and elephanticide, consider elephant jokes to be convenient disguises for racism, and symbolised the nervousness of white people about the civil rights movement. Whilst blatantly racialist jokes became less acceptable, elephant jokes were a useful proxy. Abrahams and Dundes take the joke

Q: What is big and grey and comes in quarts?

A: An elephant.

and state that the "big and grey and comes in quarts" is in fact a reference "to the supposed mammoth nature of black sexuality." Similarly, the joke about an elephant in the bathtub is argued to be a reference to the increased intrusion of black people into "the most intimate areas of white life."

Oring strongly disagrees with this view, writing: "The Civil Rights movement, of course, was an integral part of the countercultural revolution. But there is no reason to view it as the single force conditioning the joke cycle. Much more than the relations between the races was being turned on its ear. Reducing elephant jokes to a mere front for racial aggression, it seems to me, not only misses the larger sense of what the jokes are about, but the larger sense of what was going on in the society at the time." and continuing: "Elephant joking is more than a description of the episodic career of an animal with a phallic nose. What engenders the humor in such jokes is the violation of categories of expectation, and not images of subjugation, degradation, or feminization of the elephant."

Charles Gruner agrees with Oring that Abrahams' and Dundes' explanation (that "the elephant is an ambivalent father figure" that is, in reality, "the black man (perceived as a sexual threat) that stands hidden behind the image of the elephant") is an "explanation from Freudian Monsterland holds no water."

Gruner however disagrees with Oring about the chronological topicality of the elephant joke and its relation to social upheavals, arguing from personal experience of "one of the best motion picture sight gags in history", where Jimmy Durante in the 1962 movie Billy Rose's Jumbo is attempting to sneak an elephant unseen through a circus. Upon coming around a tent and being faced with a crowd of people and a policeman who demands "Where do you think you are you going with that elephant?" Durante backs against the elephant, arms wide, and asks, innocently, "What elephant?" Gunder proposes that the success of this sight gag spawned in comic writers the idea of "hiding the elephant by all sorts of ridiculous means," and thus, by extension to "other silly, stupid comparisons", the whole genre of elephant jokes.

A turnabout to the Blind men and an elephant cited below is the joke about the 4 blind elephants who felt a human. The first reports that humans are flat, the other three agree.