How the Banana Became Funny
But foolish is he who treadeth on me;
He’ll wish he had ne’er been born.
The Little Banana Peel (1882) — Robert J. Burdette
Though clearly and inarguably inferior to the rubber chicken, the time-honored gag of a man (often portly, preferably pompous, and only on the rarest of occasions, a woman) slipping on a banana peel is one of our most enduring comic devices. But how did it come to pass that the skin of this appealing fruit should become such a useful tool for humorists?
Slapstick was once a device, a wooden prop so constructed that when it struck the victim it made a loud noise but inflicted little pain. The term morphed into a name for a type of comedy, though something resembling slapstick has likely been around since the dawn of comedy.
Physical comedy typically asks that we laugh at things that shouldn’t be funny, minor calamities likely to cause a degree of pain. Whoopee cushions and joy buzzers are among the exceptions. Pies in the face or errant seltzer bottles are not quite so benevolent, as is the crustacean that pops out of your soup and pinches your nose (is my Stoogeophilia showing?), but are still rather mild.
At the other end of the spectrum are more savage renderings of slapstick — the poke in the eyes, walking into a door, taking an errant plank to the head or a garden rake to the family jewels. Or slipping on a banana peel.
Whence cometh the notion that stepping on a banana peel and sprawling ass over tit, limbs all akimbo, shoud be funny? It seems an urban legend that ranks with kidney thieves leaving their victims on ice in motel room bathtubs, but the historical record suggests otherwise.
According to learned bananologist types, this breakfast staple began appearing in the United States in the early nineteenth century, but was scarce until after the Civil War. Even then it was a luxury item that cost — in today’s numbers — as much as two dollars per banana.
Over the next half century, bananas caught on in a big way. In 1914, nearly 50 million bunches were imported into the U.S. and prices fell so low that Americans gorged on about 22 pounds a year. Some time during that span the lowly banana also began laying the citizenry low. This, due largely to lax sanitation standards, particularly in big cities.
We’ll probably never know who first felt a banana peel’s “grip on his heel,” but nasty, fruity pratfalls were common by the time Robert Burdette’s The Little Banana Peel appeared in 1882, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. A few years earlier a Chicago paper noted that thoughtlessly discarding one’s banana peel was a sure sign that one was “no Christian.”
Burdette again employed banana peels for humorous effect in Success With Small Fruits, in which a green apple and a banana peel argue over which wreak more havoc on the human race. In an interesting instance of life imitating slapstick, in 1883, humorist/clergyman Burdette was hit by a train, though he lingered on for another three decades.
A decade later James L. Ford speculated that banana peel gags and the like tickle our funny bones “because we feel that we are better off than [the victim] is.” Ford estimated that about 90 percent of the humor currently in circulation “was founded on the simple idea of disaster or misfortune.”
Lest one suspect that banana peels were solely a source of mirth, consider early accounts of unfortunates laid low by them. One of the earliest, in 1872, concerns Charles S. Bogart, a swindler attempting to run from police. He “slipped on a banana-peel, fell, lamed himself, and was recaptured.”
In 1877, Martin Robinson was tossed into a basement by a strategically placed peel, resulting in a broken wrist and two broken legs. In 1884, the New York Times wrote about a wealthy merchant named John Bassett, aged 75. Bassett “slipped on a banana peel in front of his home and broke his right leg near the hip.” The grim prognosis — “he is not expected to recover” — wasn’t one to provoke much laughter.
In 1883, an Englishman who wrote a book about Our American Cousins commented on the “two great dangers” for New York City pedestrians, one of which was “the rotting deposits of banana peel which were thrown carelessly about.” In 1896, the Times covered the War on the Banana Skin recently declared by New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt.
The future president summoned his police captains, schooling them on “the bad habits of the banana skin, dwelling particularly on its tendency to toss people into the air and bring them down with terrific force on the hard pavement.” Fines of up to five dollars or as many as 10 days in the pokey provided a disincentive for anyone to carelessly discard their peel.
New York City’s Board of Aldermen had considered such an ordinance as early as 1880, but hadn’t taken the matter seriously enough to enact a law. In 1909, in St. Louis, the banana peel was still menacing enough to prompt the city council to do just that.
By this time the banana peel gag was a tried and true staple of comedy, common in vaudeville and on stage. It appeared early on the big screen in Buster Keaton’s The High Sign (1921). Keaton later recalled that the scene was initially constructed so that he approached the banana peel but didn’t step on it. Feedback from test audiences caused him to restructure it, bypassing the first banana peel only to be upended by the second one.
The Pilgrim (1923) was among the Charlie Chaplin films to employ the gag, which was already growing a bit tired. A decade or so later a screenwriter supposedly asked Chaplin how to freshen up the old gag, which has “been done a million times.”
In Many A Slip (1927), comedian Charley Bowers worked on a slip-proof banana, resulting in a riot of pratfalling. That same year Stan and Ollie trotted out the gag in The Battle of the Century, where it led to a pie fight of epic proportions.
Interestingly, Ollie’s motivation for tripping up his skinny companion with a banana skin had much to do with the latter’s insurance policy, an example of art imitating real life. As early as 1894, the Freemans, an enterprising family of swindlers, were making a nice living filing false claims against railroads for injuries allegedly sustained from slipping on banana peels.
By 1910, Mrs. Anna H. Sturla, aka Banana Anna, had the considerable misfortune to have been involved in 17 serious accidents in the previous four years, 11 intitated by banana peels, or what one bemused reporter called “that Yellow Peril of her life!” These incidents were nothing more than Sturla’s attempt to bilk railroads and others out of settlement money, a con that landed her in a prison cell.
These banana-peelers were common — and the bane of railroads, in particular — in the Twenties and Thirties. Their numbers dwindled after that, but the notion turned up as late as 1967 in The Fortune Cookie, which starred Walter Matthau as a shady attorney looking for quick cash. As late as 2003, a Cook County hospital employee collected several thousand dollars due to a (presumably legitimate) injury after slipping on a banana peel at work.
The banana peel gag still turns up (see YouTube, for starters), but its heyday has probably passed. Perhaps its ultimate expression came in 1973 when Woody Allen had his characters in Sleeper pratfalling on a giant banana peel.
It was a good year for the banana peel gag, 1973 was, just a few years after a substance called Instant Banana Peel (Riotril) was rolled out for purposes of crowd control and the same year Pynchon employed it in Gravity’s Rainbow, along with the even better gag of having a chimp trying to slap people with a banana peel.
One might assume that modern day sanitation practices have left our city streets relatively safe — as least as far as banana peels are concerned. But the Web site London Bananas may put the lie to this assumption, given that it’s composed solely of “images of banana skins found in the urban landscape.”
And may God have mercy upon your posterior.
