Free The Joker: A Memoir by Andrew Hudgins

But it symbolized all those uncleannesses, and if the apostle had continued “and such like, including toe jam, snot, spit, mucus, eye buggers, gnawed fingernails, peeled blisters, dingleberries, and both number one and number two,” he would have resolved some theological implications that had vexed me as a boy.
    Toe jam was oddly sinister then, but also gross, comic, and mysterious. The joke about the poky Africans reduced human life to sloughed skin, and I feared that, in life, I was a slow native, one who’d be trampled by the ambitions and talents of other people. And of course I was afraid of death itself, the elephant that tramples and smashes us all to black stuff between its toes. My mind careened through these possibilities, never settling on any one for long, and the unsteady equation of myself with natives, toe jam, failure, and death, along with the image of a ridiculously outsized elephant who didn’t even notice people smushed between its toes, made me laugh. In the shifty joke, I glimpsed fears that I didn’t want to think about nakedly because they were too frightening without some clothes thrown over them. I was becoming a teenager, a time when taboos are as fascinating as they are frightening, and they’re a potent force in jokes.
    Death, religion, race, and sex make jokes funny because fear, tripped as it stalks toward us, makes the reversal of expectation more powerful. It’s funny when a clown trips over his big shoes, funnier when a banker in a bowler slips on a banana peel, and funniest of all when a boogeyman jumps out of the bushes, skids on wet leaves, and falls on his face as he’s shouting “Boo.” Our relief at not being harmed makes us laugh even harder because we know we might not be laughing at all the next time the boogeyman jumps out at us.
    Death is a fine taboo, but sex is finer. My joke about elephants and their dislike for black lace panties went over so well at the junior-high lunch table because it nudged up against the naughtiness of sex, though I was myself as sexually uninformed as it was possible to be. I affected a jaunty knowingness that in retrospect is funnier than the joke, which worked despite the fact that the boy telling it didn’t really understand it. But I knew enough to evoke the taboo subject of sex and twist it for a laugh. The joke, though small, lived larger than its medium.
    Neither did I, as a teenager, entirely understand this joke: “What does an elephant use for a tampon?” Answer: A sheep. I told the joke a time or two, uneasily, and laughed at it; when I laughed, it was uncomfortably and self-consciously. Until I was married, menstruation was a mystery. I understood the physiology, but not what it meant in practical terms. So, though I seldom repeated the joke, I thought about it a lot. I was tickled by the image I concocted of an elephant grabbing a sheep with its trunk and jamming it up under its tail, and the white sheep turning red. But when the mysterious sexual opening was enlarged to the point that it took a sheep to cover it, I squirmed, nervous both about what the joke implied about the largeness and bestial nature of sex, and afraid that someone more honest than I would say, “I don’t get it” and ask me to explain. I could have babbled something like, “See, elephants and sheep don’t go together naturally, and so it’s funny that an elephantwould have to use a sheep for something an elephant doesn’t need, and take it and jam it into her private parts.” True enough, as far as it goes. But isn’t the point of the joke that human fastidiousness about sexual taboos, like the “uncleanness” of menstruation, is unknown to animals, and our ideas of civilization are mocked when we see an elephant try to find a natural equivalent to a tampon? That was a possible truth I was not ready to entertain or be entertained by.
    Despite my queasiness with the sheep, most elephant jokes were becoming a bit tame for my changing taste. Before