Chickens Telling Elephant Jokes! No, Really!

Back in the days of old, when I got my first flock, there was a little fluffy white Silky roo. I’d gotten a conglomeration of chickens from a variety of sources and he was the only Silkie. I named this little dude Snowball, and he quickly became one of my favorites. Because Silkies are so different from other breeds and because he was the only Silkie he stood out to anybody who visited my coop. He stood out to the other chickens too. Not in a positive way. As this new flock worked out a pecking order, Snowball found himself on the very bottom.

Because of their weird feather structure, Silkies are not great flyers. And because it’s hard for them to fly onto a roost, they usually just sleep on the floor. Snowball always valiantly flapped his way onto the roost every night. I’m sure he saw every other chicken doing it, so he decided that was just how it was done.

Eventually, he spent all day on the roost. The level of brutality aimed at him by some of the other chickens became so severe that the roost was the only place he felt safe. And eventually, to keep him safe from his mean flock mates, I would lift him down to the water fount and stand guard so he could drink - and I would feed him from my hand while holding him in my lap. It was not a good situation.

And then, to further compound the calamity of this bad situation I added a couple Silkie hens to the flock. Bad plan, right? Well, I was a newbie and was pretty ignorant about flock dynamics and bullying. Emily, a little black Silkie hen, and Courtney a white one, joined Snowball as flock underdogs. Angitou came along around the same time. She was a pretty little gold laced Polish girl, who had a beautiful bouffant hairdo and a jittery disposition. She spent her days bouncing off the walls of the coop in utter terror as other hens chased after her delivering hard pecks.

These four sweet and congenial chickens had become the flock punching bags, so I did what I had to do. I cordoned off an area about the size of a phone booth in one corner of the coop, and all four of the bullied chickens went to live there. They were away from their persecutors, but were in a vanishingly small space. I needed a better solution.

Snowball and Emily explore their new coop - still under construction

That’s when I built Coop 2 – a separate coop on the other side of the barn complete with its own outdoor run. When I moved these four little underdogs into the new coop, life got a bazillion times better for them. They settled right in, bonded, and became a happy little family.

After about a year of chicken keeping, I’d not only become smarter about chicken keeping but I’d doubled my infrastructure to two coops!

I would never admit this in front of the other chickens, but the Coop 2 chickens were definitely my favorites. Do you think I took lots of pictures of them? Well, they were very photogenic. They were even rendered on canvas! My wife commissioned their portrait by Wisconsin artist Susan Martin as a surprise birthday present for me. That picture appears in the right margin on every one of my website pages, and is also the profile picture on my blog’s Facebook page.

Snowball and Angitou shared a special bond. While the two Silkie hens roosted on the floor, these two lovebirds snuggled together on the roost every night. Needless to say, there are lots of Snowball/Angitou pics!

Then, in 2016, I started writing the first version of this blog. Those early posts contained a lot of those pictures. Eventually, I started adding dialogue balloons. And somehow that morphed into elephant jokes. Yep, elephant jokes. Nope. I don’t know why either. But all my followers seemed to like them at the time. All twelve of them!

If you’re under a certain age, it’s possible you’re ignorant of the elephant joke phenomenon. Elephant jokes have definitely waxed and waned in popularity since they first made their appearance in the late 1950’s. At the moment they don’t rank up there with ANC earbuds, TikTok or Taylor Swift. But it’s only a matter of time before they make their comeback.

All you need to know about elephant jokes is that they have two elements: One, elephants; Two, absurdity. That’s all it takes. Almost everybody realizes that they don’t approach the pinnacle of sophisticated humor. There are, of course, the select few who understand that elephant jokes are simply beyond the comprehension of the common rabble.

Isaac Asimov, in his book, Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor, suggested that elephant jokes would remain forever "favorites of youngsters and of unsophisticated adults." He failed to mention anything about young or unsophisticated chickens. Yet Snowball kept the Coop 2 hens in stitches. Especially Angitou.

From deep in the files of blog posts past, here are Snowball, Angitou, and some elephant jokes!