Hello, I'm Michael Swaim and welcome back to Tales from the Pit.

This is your content warning.

This episode, I'll be speaking with Beba Pickles about her experiences with anxiety, panic, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, addiction, and most

terrifying of all, trying to find the right mood medication for her. If you can believe it, we even find some time

to discuss how all of these issues, both hinder and enrich her art. I hope you

enjoy the conversation. In July 1963, the Cleveland Ohio paper, The Plain Dealer, published a short article with several jokes about elephants

because the news cycle was simpler then. Probably the most famous joke from

that article is the following which I will gussy up by reading

as a Brooklyn meathead and Dracula.

Blue, how do you make a statue of an elephant?

I don't know, Dracula.

How about you get the biggest granite block you can find,

and then chip away all the parts what doesn't look like an elephant?

Tragically, this joke represented the funniest humor available at the time.

This was of course long before America began exploiting Canada's vast underground humor reserves.

Case in point, before that joke, the previous funniest thing related to elephants was an old newsreel of Thomas Edison

electrocuting one to death.

But, this joke, if it can be called a joke, has stood the test of time,

and I imagine it's for the same reasons that Granite does does and elephants do.

Elephant do.

By meaning something to human beings.

Statues are erected, cherished, or demolished as an expression of our collective will.

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