Seeing pink elephants  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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"Seeing pink elephants" is a euphemism for drunken hallucination, caused by alcoholic hallucinosis or delirium tremens.

• Jack London, describing one sort of alcoholic in the autobiographical John Barleycorn, writes that he "is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers."
• A reference to pink elephants occurs in the 1941 Disney animated classic Dumbo. Dumbo, having taken a drink of water from a bucket spiked with moonshine, begins to hallucinate singing and dancing "Pink Elephants on Parade."
• Jazz musician Sun Ra performed this Disney song often with his band the Arkestra in the 1970s, and said that he did so because humanity needed calming to prevent nuclear war.
• In The Simpsons episode "D'oh-in' in the Wind", Barney Gumble, under the influence of peyote, has a hallucination of a monster. He quickly drinks a beer, which causes a pink elephant in a top hat and monocle to appear and destroy the monster. He calls the elephant "Pinky", implying a familiarial relationship between them, as the elephant tips his hat to him.
• The phrase is also used in Maakies, a comic strip by Tony Millionaire, in a strip entitled "It's The Early Bird! Run!!"
• A slight variation on the pink elephant appeared in Punch Trunk, a 1953 Looney Tunes cartoon, in which a drunk spots a tiny (but grey) elephant, looks at his watch, and proclaims to the elephant "You're late!" He then staggers away, commenting "He always used to be pink." The animated film Daffy Duck's Quackbusters shows the elephant being spotted by a great number of people, which Daffy misconstrues as public hysteria.
• The Huyghe Brewery in Melle, Belgium brews several beers, including Delirium Tremens, which feature pink elephants on the label.
• In Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 Ollie the Magic Bum, assumed to be drunk, gives a mission involving collecting Pink Elephants.
• In the Madonna song 'Dear Jessie' the chorus starts with the phrase "Pink elephants and lemonade".
• In the Strong Bad Email nightlife ([1]) Bubs asks if Strong Bad wants a shot of "Pink Elephant Pants".
• If characters in certain areas of World of Warcraft ingest large amounts of alcohol, tiny pink elekks (which bear a strong resemblance to elephants) appear, along with various other hallucinations.