Here’s an idea! Let’s take wild animals and bring them into town! Better yet, let’s take them from town to town to town!
Zoos and circuses have entertained and educated millions of adults and kids, but it’s an idea just made for laughing at: elephants in Illinois, gorillas in Georgetown, pandas in Poughkeepsie. What are we to make of wild animals when they’re out of their natural environment? And what must they make of us in ours? These jokes work both ways—and that’s just the way it should be!
Chuck was on vacation and exploring the African bush when he found an elephant wincing in pain. He noticed it was limping and spotted a giant splinter of wood sticking out of its foot. Thinking he must be crazy, Chuck carefully approached the elephant, which seemed to sense he was trying to help. Gently and carefully, he removed the splinter.
The elephant put its foot down tenderly and discovered it could walk again. It walked a few steps away then turned and looked Chuck in the eye. They held each other’s gaze for a while, establishing a real bond, and then the elephant walked off into the bush.
Ten years later, Chuck went to a circus. When the elephants came in he noticed one animal in particular kept looking over at him. I wonder… he thought. Could it possibly be the same elephant?
He needed a closer look. So after the show he went around to the elephant compound and snuck in while no one was looking. None of the elephants paid him any attention—except the one that had been looking at him earlier. It moved away from the herd, slowly walked over to Chuck, lowered its head, and looked deeply into his eyes. Ten…
The elephant wrapped its trunk around him, lifted him up, and flung Chuck right over the circus tent.
Naw! It wasn’t the same elephant.
A man once applied for a job as a circus lion tamer. The ringmaster asked if he had any experience, and the man said, “Why, yes. My father was one of the most famous lion tamers in the world, and he taught me everything he knew.”
“Really?” said the ringmaster. “Did he teach you how to make a lion jump through a flaming hoop?”
“Yes, he did,” the man replied.
“And did he teach you how to have six lions form a pyramid?”
“Yes, he did,” the man replied.
Impressed, the ringmaster went for the biggest question in the lion-taming world.
“Have you ever stuck your head in a lion’s mouth?”
“Just once,” the man replied.
The ringmaster asked, “Why only once?”
And the man said, “I was looking for my father.”
One day an out-of-work mime is visiting the zoo and attempts to earn some money as a street performer.
However, as soon as he starts to draw a crowd, the zookeeper grabs him and drags him into his office.
The zookeeper explains to the mime that the zoo’s most popular attraction, a gorilla, has died suddenly. The keeper fears that attendance at the zoo will fall off. He offers the mime a job to dress up as the gorilla until they can get another one. The mime accepts.
The next morning, before the crowd arrives, the mime puts on the gorilla suit and enters the cage. He discovers that it’s a great job. He can sleep all he wants, play and make fun of people, and he draws bigger crowds than he ever did as a mime.
However, eventually the crowds tire of him, and he gets bored just swinging on tires. He begins to notice that the people are paying more attention to the lion in the cage next to his.
Not wanting to lose the attention of his audience, he climbs to the top of his cage, crawls across a partition, and dangles from the top of the lion’s cage. Of course, this makes the lion furious, but the crowd loves it.
At the end of the day the zookeeper comes and gives the mime a raise for being such a good attraction as a gorilla.
Well, this goes on for some time. The mime keeps taunting the lion, the crowds grow larger, and his salary keeps going up. Then one terrible day when he is dangling over the furious lion, he slips and falls. The mime is terrified. The lion gathers itself and prepares to pounce. The mime is so scared that he begins to run ‘round and ‘round the cage with the lion close behind. Finally, the mime starts screaming and yelling, “Help! Help me!” but the lion is quick and pounces. The mime soon finds himself flat on his back looking up at the angry lion, and the lion says, “Shut up, you idiot! Do you want to get us both fired?”
Jimmy had gone for an elephant ride in the zoo, but halfway through the ride the elephant handler was called away. Feeling pretty confident, Jimmy kept guiding the elephant on his own. It was great fun, until it came time to go home and he realized he didn’t know the command to make the elephant kneel so he could get off.
“Hey,” he shouted to anyone who would listen.
“How do you get down from an elephant?”
“Well you don’t, silly,” a little girl replied.
“Everyone knows you get down from a goose.”
Two lions escaped from their cage in the circus. Everyone ran as fast as they could, but the two clowns were slower than the rest (because of their giant shoes), and the lions managed to take a bite out of each of them.
One lion turned to the other and said, “Did your clown taste funny?”
A reporter was investigating a story about a lion tamer being attacked by one of his big cats. Everyone else was busy, so he got the details from the clown.
“Was the lion tamer clawed?” the reporter asked.
“He’s new here,” said the clown. “I don’t actually know what his name is.”
A duck walked into a diner and sat down in a booth.
The cook looked over at him and said, “Hang on! You’re a duck!”
“I see your eyes are working,” replied the duck.
“And you can talk!” yelled the cook.
“I see your ears are working, too,” said the duck
“Now if you don’t mind, can I have a coffee and a salad please?”
“Certainly, sorry about that,” said the cook. “It’s just that we don’t get many ducks in this diner. What are you doing around here?”
“I’m working on the building site across the road,” explained the duck. “I’m a drywaller.”
The duck came in every day for the next two weeks.
Then one day the circus came to town. The ringmaster came into the diner, and the cook said to him, “I know this talking duck who could be just amazing in your circus!”
“Sounds good,” said the ringmaster, handing over his business card. “Get him to give me a call.”
So the next day when the duck came in the cook said, “Hey, Mr. Duck, I reckon I can line you up with a top job, paying really good money.”
“I’m always looking for the next job,” said the duck. “Where is it?”
“At the circus,” said the cook.
“The circus?” said the duck, clearly confused.
“That’s right,” replied the cook.
“With all the animals that live in cages and performers who live in caravans?” asked the duck.
“Of course,” the cook replied.
“And the tent has canvas sides and a big canvas roof with a hole in the middle?” the duck persisted.
“That’s right!” said the cook.
The duck shook its head in amazement and said, “I don’t get it. What would they want with a drywaller?”
Q: What’s the name of the world’s worst lion tamer?
A: Claude Bottom!
The manager of a large city zoo was drafting a letter to order a pair of animals. He sat at his computer and typed, “I would like to place an order for two mongooses, to be delivered at your earliest convenience.”
He stared at the screen, focusing on that odd word—mongooses. Then he deleted the word and added another, so that the sentence read, “I would like to place an order for two mongeese, to be delivered at your earliest convenience.”
Again he stared at the screen, this time focusing on the new word, which seemed just as odd as the other one. So he deleted the word and added another, so that the sentence read, “I would like to place an order for two mongi, to be delivered at your earliest convenience.”
It still didn’t look right, but he couldn’t think of any other words that might work. Finally, he deleted the whole sentence and started all over.
“Everyone knows,” he wrote, “that no fully stocked zoo should be without a mongoose. Please send us two of them.”
The zookeepers started work one morning and noticed the kangaroo had escaped from its enclosure. They rounded it up and erected a ten-foot fence around the enclosure.
The next morning the kangaroo was hopping around the zoo again. They put it back in its enclosure and built the fence up to twenty feet.
The next morning the kangaroo was hopping around the zoo again. And once again the zookeepers put it back in its enclosure then raised the fence to forty feet.
The kangaroo and its friend watched the workmen pack up their tools, and the friend said, “I wonder how high they’re gonna go with that.”
The kangaroo said, “I don’t care. Just so long as they keep leaving the gate unlocked!”
The boss of the zoo really told of one of the keepers.
Afterward one of the keeper’s colleagues said, “That sounded rough. What did you do?”
The keeper said, “I left the lion’s cage unlocked.”
“Wow,” his colleague said. “I guess that was pretty serious.”
“You think so?” laughed the keeper. “Who’s going to steal a lion?”