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And Another Thing

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 11th June 2008

Don’t ask an African elephant to show you his cardiograms

Some ancient writers insist that elephants have a strong sense of humour and can be delightful comedians. True? Certainly, John Milton accepted the belief. I am fond of Milton, despite his gruesome religious beliefs, and on one occasion, when a fierce woman don insisted that Milton was humourless and that the entire corpus of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained did not contain a single joke, I quoted Book Four, describing Adam and Eve’s honeymoon and the efforts of the animals in Eden to entertain them:

The unwieldy elephant,
To make them mirth used all his might, and wreathed
His lithe proboscis.

This was the earliest circus elephant in history, the original Jumbo, though the first so-named was the large African beast which gave rides to children at the London Zoo, was sold to Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth in 1882, and killed by a railway engine three years later. In the army, if you are big and nice you are known as Jumbo, like Colonel Trotter in Evelyn Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen, or if you are big and fierce they call you ‘Bull’, like General Allenby. Colonel Wigg MP, head prefect of Harold Wilson’s Number 10, was a Jumbo type, for though fierce and often furious, his antics, facial expressions, threats (‘I’ll have your guts for garters’) and conspiracy theories were a source of endless chuckles.

By contrast, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was the bull African elephant type. If you went to his little den off the Oval Office, with its four TV sets fixed in the wall, all on, he would try and terrify you. His face was enormous, and on each side was a colossal ear, exactly like the beast in the bush. He would gradually move his face nearer yours, until his massive nose was almost touching. Men came out of his presence bruised, and women hysterical with fear. But if you kept your head and laughed, he would suddenly change tactics and inundate you with self-pity, pouring out of his side-pockets all his medical records, cardiograms, etc. No self-respecting elephant would do that.