1.32 - Barber the Elephant

MONKEY ISLAND, JANUARY, 1987 - It has been speculated that if you sit one hundred monkeys in front of one hundred typewriters for one hundred years, eventually they will reproduce the greatest works of literature ever known to humankind. Or they'll spend all that time throwing their feces around, and beating the hell out of one another with the machines. Not matter what they do, the room is sure to stink to high heaven before long.

We've never tried that experiment on Monkey Island, though if we did, my vote would go for the latter event to occur. What we do have though, is a unique place known as the Elephants Barber College.

This is the place that young, career-minded elephants attend in order to avoid the otherwise mandatory service in the circus, not at all unlike those young men who sought student deferments during the Vietnam War. Of course, most people realize that elephants are completely unfit to serve as barbers, considering that it is impossible for them to operate a pair of scissors, given their lack not only of opposable thumbs, but opposable nostrils as well.

Oh but they try, as do their instructors. It isn't easy teaching a two and a half-ton pachyderm to wield a three-foot straight razor with his trunk, nor is it very safe. Students and teachers regularly wind up in the infirmary, and something as simple as a shaving cut very often ends up with someone bleeding to death.