CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE: BAD JOKES: WHERE DOES A 2,000-POUND ELEPHANT SLEEP?

You got to the age of 5 or 6 and started torturing your family with hundreds and hundreds of elephant jokes and knock-knock jokes and other truly bad jokes until you reached some plateau in the maturation process and moved on to new and improved ways of torturing adults.

Like dating musicians and making noise about dropping out of college to marry them.

Or calling (long distance and collect) to tell the folks you're thinking about quitting your job and moving back home, just 'til you get your life straightened out.

Or your probation's over, whichever comes first.

You remember elephant jokes. Who could forget this classic?

Q: Why did the elephant wear red tennis shoes (or paint his toenails red)?

A: So he could hide in the cherry tree!

Or this one:

Q: Where does a 2,000-pound elephant sleep?

A: Anywhere he wants to.

You could, of course, substitute gorilla in that last one; I have a feeling, though, that gorilla jokes are a whole separate sub-genre of putrid humor, just like blonde jokes and lawyer jokes.

The true humor in bad jokes is the realization that you should be able to figure out the punch line. It's not the joke itself that's funny; it's the grimace on the victim's face when she realizes she should have seen it coming.

I think putrid humor operates on the "half a loaf" theory: Bad jokes are better than no jokes at all.

Bad jokes are like really greasy, salty potato chips; you could tell just one, but a dozen or so are so much more satisfying.

I found 22 web sites for elephant jokes on the Internet. I'm not giving out the addresses because I'd rather not spend the next six months hearing them.

A recent trip to the ancestral home revealed a plethora of officially bad jokes printed on paper cups.

Children don't need to read paper cups to learn elephant jokes; they pick them up through osmosis. My surmise is these paper cups are designed to allow adults to torture one another.

There's something very scary about realizing that someone in her 30s or 40s or even older still gets a charge out of telling elephant jokes.

My beloved Pop, who is in his seventh decade, gleefully reeled off a number of bad jokes from the aforementioned paper cups.

F'r instance:

Q: What's the difference between a flea and an elephant?

A: An elephant can have fleas, but a flea can't have elephants.

Or my personal favorite (and one to which I never tumble):

Q. What's big and red and eats rocks?

A: A big, red rock-eater.

I have a college degree. I should have seen that one coming.

Of course, I could say the same thing about Newt Gingrich.

I guess I'm still waiting for the punch line.

Peggy O'Farrell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourians.