Eugene Volokh recites a joke…

… and a herd of hilarity ensues in the comments. He wrote:

I was reminded today of one of my favorite jokes: A Frenchman, a German, and a Jew were asked to write books about elephants. The German writes a seven-volume treatise, Die Elefanten. The Frenchman writes The Love Life of the Elephant. The Jew writes Many Famous Elephants Were Jewish.

The many variations of the joke as enumerated by his commenters are even more hilarious. The one with the Norwegian ("It came from Sweden. The Norwegians, who hiked to Africa to study elephants, wrote: 'On Norway and the hardy Norwegians'") struck me as particularly funny (because of our Scandinavian connection).

A Norwegian promptly replied, "We of Norwegian extraction know that the Swedes have never grasped that it’s normal to discover the South Pole on your way to join the Rotary Club."

Visiting Copenhagen some years ago, we came across a street performer with a crowd around him. He was making jokes about everything, including Americans of course. Then he made a staple Danish joke, which is saying something along the lines of the Swedes are inmates (escapees?) of the insane asylum. (That's apparently an old joke, because my husband keeps repeating variations of it, and something about how Norwegians can't pronounce anything properly.)

A group of people booed, stood up and walked away. Yep, they were Swedes. Performer shrugged his shoulders, and continued his schtick. Win some, lose some. Or something.

I don't remember the performer or the rest of his schtick, but the spectacle of a group of Swedes booing and walking away stuck with me. I just thought it was funny.

Back to Volokh:

Another variation among the commenters' is this:

A Frenchman, an Englishman, and a German each write an account of the camel.

The Frenchman visits the Jardine des Plantes, chats with some pretty women he encounters there, pokes the camel with the tip of his umbrella, and goes home and writes a witty feuilleton on the experience.

The Englishman recruits and equips an expedition to the Sahara, and after many months of hardship, returns with notebooks which he publishes, full of factual observations.

The German, despising the Frenchman’s frivolity and the Englishman’s lack of general concepts, retreats to his study, from whence he emerges after several months, having penned a 600-page treatise: The Idea of the Camel Derived from the Concept of the Ego.

And finally, for the modern update:

Janet Napolitano: Elephant Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Crushing Stampedes

Douglas Adams — The Elephant at the End of the Universe

Mel Brooks: Blazing Howdahs

Julia Child — Mastering the Art of Elephant Cooking

Spencer Johnson: Who Moved My Peanuts?

Glenn Reynolds: They Told Me If I Voted For John McCain, They’d Be Publishing a Bunch of Elephant Books — And They Were Right!