Bananas Read online

  “I will write when I get on my feet,” postcard (1906).

  The Reader’s Digest and other compendiums of gravestone humor have published an epitaph attributed to Enosburg, Vermont, that reads:

  Here lies the body of our Anna

  Done to death by a banana.

  It wasn’t the fruit that laid her low

  But the skin of the thing that made her go.48

  Unfortunately a search of seven graveyards in Enosburg County failed to find the stone. The local historical society has also been unable to locate it so the epitaph is probably apocryphal. The notion of the danger of banana peels is so much a part of our culture that the idea of dying from a fall is humorous but also easily acceptable. There are also reports of passengers bringing successful lawsuits against railroad companies for bodily injuries sustained by slipping and falling on banana skins.49 The author of Accidentally, On Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America claims that F. E. Caldwell made his living in the 1920s by riding in railcars and slipping on banana peels that he had carefully tossed at his own feet. “Though he was never prosecuted, some of the many ‘banana-peelers’ he inspired did hard time.”50 The idea of slipping on a banana peel is also expressed in the wry expression used when life seems to be falling apart: to have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.

  Records of banana peel pratfalls in vaudeville routines are hard to find, although a few did include bananas. Annette Kellermann, famous for swimming the English channel and known as the Million Dollar Mermaid, ate a banana underwater in a tank on stage as part of her act. In the 1950s Florida’s Weeki Wachee Spring of the Mermaids near Brooksville offered tourists an underwater show where “two of the lovely talented Mermaids will thrill you with their awe-inspiring performance” including eating bananas underwater.51 This was an impressive physical feat with strong phallic overtones.

  A. Robbins was a clown with a novelty act in which he would take a seemingly endless number of bananas out of his pockets. The Billboard noted in 1930 that it was “a sure-fire act.”52 Robbins took his act to television in the 1950s, appearing as the banana man on the Ed Sullivan show and later the children’s show “Captain Kangaroo.” Robbins wore a baggy suit and a clown wig of straight hair. He never spoke but uttered a high-pitched wail while pulling bananas from every pocket in his suit, and squares of cardboard that he opened to make boxes. When he finished, there would be three boxes resembling freight train cars which would be full of bananas. Then the suit was turned into a train engineer’s outfit and he would chug off stage.53 Another vaudevillian, George L. Rockwell, known as Dr. Rockwell, Quack, Quack, Quack, gave a lecture on the human anatomy using a banana stalk as a skeleton.

  Banana pratfalls appeared in silent films such as Banana Skins (1908) and The Passing of a Grouch (1910), and talking pictures such as Sherlock Jr. (1924) and The Cameraman starring Buster Keaton. In Banana Skins a street vendor sells a hand of bananas to a mother and child and they are followed by the camera as they discard banana peels along the route for others to slip on. The Passing of a Grouch begins with a man slipping on a banana peel on the way to the office. The rest of his day is one long series of mishaps.

  Humor also plays with inverted situations: we enjoy the surprise of expecting the same joke and finding it reversed. Clowning is funnier when the tricks seem to fail. Slapstick comedy uses caricature, exaggerated action, and overdramatization as in the Sherlock Jr. film where Buster Keaton lays a trap for a rival with a banana peel, and then forgets and slips on it himself. We anticipate the fall of the villain, then laugh when the hero entraps himself. Hit the Ice (1943) with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello includes a scene where Costello pulls a banana out of his pocket instead of a gun. We laugh at incongruity, at frustrated expectations. In addition, this was a parody of Mae West’s famous line, “Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you glad to see me?” One of the highlights of a more recent film, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, featured Ethel Merman slipping on a banana peel.

  When the song “Yes, We Have No Bananas” by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn achieved enormous popularity in 1923, selling at a rate of 25,000 copies a day, some flappers and their beaus carefully danced the Charleston on banana-peel strewn dance floors.54 Banana peels were used as a symbol of defiance against the establishment concerns for safety and order. The song’s popularity enabled Frank Silver to tour the country with a “Banana Band” for several years. The musicians wore gold costumes and performed on daises decorated with glittery banana cutouts.55 “Yes! We Have No Bananas” was featured in the 1930 movie Mammy, starring Al Jolson with music and lyrics by Irving Berlin.

  Current banana-peel jokes no longer appear to be actuated by feelings of hostility; rather, the humor arises from feelings of empathy. Life is unsure, a pratfall may lie just around the corner, you may be the one to slip up next, and pratfalls are no longer funny if anyone gets hurt. James Thurber suggests that “the things we laugh at are awful while they are going on but funny when we look back. And other people laugh because they’ve been through it, too.”56

  Are banana skins really a hazard to pedestrians? They decay rapidly and are only potentially slippery when freshly discarded. They are also large and rather obvious when lying on a sidewalk. The banana skin pratfall has become an important comic element in our culture but few people claim to have slipped on one themselves or actually know of someone who has fallen. The idea is funny—because it is so improbable?

  Obscene wit is sexual exhibition and the banana serves as a ready symbol because of its phallic associations.57 Although William Safire suggests that Americans find bananas amusing—“a sunny yellow curved in the shape of a smile, as if to say, ‘Have a Nice Day’ ”—bananas are frankly phallic.58 The size and shape of the banana may explain its exclusion from polite dining room art in the nineteenth century, although humorous paintings did include bananas. A pair of paintings depicting monkeys destroying a dining room in the process of raiding a bowl of fruit containing bananas was painted by Henry Church of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, between 1895 and 1900. Another of a dog and a monkey in a dining room was painted by Robert Walter Weir who died in 1887. These humorous paintings relied on the contrast between the dining room as it is, or ought to be, and the wreckage caused by an almost human agent. Banana paintings represent suppressed hostility at social control and the conventions of polite society as they are usually played out in the dining room.

  Josephine Baker, an American jazz dancer in Paris, took the city by storm in 1924 wearing nothing but a belt of glittering bananas and a pearl necklace during her performance.59 Another exotic singer and dancer, Carmen Miranda (known as the Brazilian Bombshell), was imported from Rio in 1939 as part of Hollywood’s propaganda efforts for Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy with Latin America.60 She became one of the highest-paid performers in Hollywood in the 1940s and was immensely popular in the United States until her career went into a decline in the 1950s. She wore flamboyant costumes with a bare midriff, occasionally sported headdresses or hats with tropical fruit motifs, and recorded the hit song “Bananas Is My Business.” In the 1943 Busby Berkeley film The Gang’s All Here, featuring Miranda, a scene in a Broadway nightclub decorated as a banana grove included barrel organ players, performing monkeys, and a chorus line of beautiful women carrying huge bananas with overtly phallic symbolism. At one point, they sit on the ground waving the giant bananas which they hold between their legs while Miranda sings “The Lady in the Tutti Fruitti Hat.” The climax to this scene is an explosion of bananas from Carmen Miranda’s head.61 One of Miranda’s hit songs was “I Make My Money with Bananas.”

  The ubiquitous banana split, a combination of a banana and several scoops of ice cream topped with sauce and whipped cream, can be seen as an erotic creation, traditionally shared by teenaged couples as in Louis Prima’s recording of the song “Banana Split for My Baby.” Images of women eating bananas are also considered slightly risque or in bad taste. Amy Vanderbilt recommen
ded that, except at picnics, bananas should be peeled and then broken up “as needed into small pieces” and “conveyed to the mouth with the fingers.”62 Jay Leno, television host of the Tonight Show, had fun insisting that a reluctant woman guest peel and eat a banana as he interviewed the curator of the California banana museum in July 1995. In many high school sex education classes, bananas are used to demonstrate condom use.

  Unidentified photograph of young women eating bananas, n.d.

  In addition to the dangers of slipping on banana peels and the erotic connotations of the fruit, many people associate bananas with spiders and snakes. Tarantulas, small snakes, and other creatures are found in the bunches of bananas cut in the tropics, or at least were common before the widespread use of pesticides. In 1885 readers of the weekly newspaper The Cook were cautioned:

  Mrs. B—, City—. We have published recipes for the cooking of bananas. Refer to your file of The Cook. It will be most economical to buy them by the bunch for so large a family, and if they are not “dead ripe” when you get them, they will keep quite well as long as necessary. But take care that no tarantulas, scorpions or centipedes are hidden in the bunch as they very frequently are.63

  An article in Popular Science in 1894 noted that “we shudder at dreadful stories of venomous tarantulas and scorpions lurking in those compact clusters.”64 Ten years later, an article in Scientific American stated that “it is not unusual for snakes, tarantulas, and similar unpleasant customers to find a lodging in a bunch of bananas and when discovered at the loading point, the fact ‘snake in this car’ is usually chalked on the outside, and the carriers handle the bunches very gingerly at the wharf.”65 Tarantulas were popularly known as banana spiders and a 1946 article in Nature magazine identified them as “the poisonous spider often found in bunches of bananas when they are shipped to this country.”66 Refrigeration during shipping simply caused the stowaways to hibernate, waking up when the fruit reached room temperature. In attempts to kill the unwanted creatures, ship holds were made air tight and pumped full of gases.67 One of the favorite stories of a veterinarian in Connecticut in the 1950s was of receiving a small boa constrictor found in a banana ship in New Haven harbor. The snake escaped and he and his wife turned the house upside down looking for it. Several weeks later, the snake was found curled up in the springs of their bed.

  The practice of boxing hands of bananas instead of shipping the fruit on the stalk, as well as dipping the fruit in acid to wash off pesticide residue, pretty well eliminated the possibility of tropical insects and snakes being found by North American consumers. Yet the association still remains strong for many Americans forty years later. The cartoonist Gary Larson has an image of two tarantulas sitting in a living room with the caption “It’s a letter from Julio in America.… His banana bunch arrived safely and he’s living in the back room of some grocery store.”68 Larson turned the concept upside down with a cartoon of poodles sticking out of bunches of bananas being unloaded from a ship with the caption “How poodles first came to North America.”69 The association remains strong in our folklore despite the fact that there probably hasn’t been a stowaway since the 1960s. This brainteaser was published in Parade Magazine in 1993:

  There are three boxes in a South American warehouse—one marked “Tarantulas,” one marked “Bananas,” and the third marked “Tarantulas and Bananas.” You are told that all three boxes are marked wrong, and you must rearrange the labels correctly. Without peeking, you may withdraw only one item from each box. What is the minimum number of boxes from which you would have to remove an item in order to be able to correctly label all three?70

  The other creature associated with bananas is the monkey. Despite the fact that many monkeys do not have bananas available to them in the wild, bananas are widely believed to be the basis of their diet. The association may have begun with Italian organ grinders who provided street entertainment that often included a monkey to attract children. Popular imagination may have conflated them with the Italian fruit vendors who also had pushcarts and were frequently seen in the city streets. Chimpanzees and apes are often portrayed with bananas. In the 1964 Ray Drusky hit song “Peel Me a Nanner,” the lyrics included

  Peel me a nanner, toss me a peanut

  I’ll come a-swingin’ from a coconut tree

  Peel me a nanner, toss me a peanut

  You sure made a monkey out of me.71

  The New Dictionary of American Slang states that “to go bananas” comes from the spectacle of monkeys or apes greedily gobbling bananas.72 When someone “goes bananas,” they are said to be acting as crazy as a monkey. In a “B.C.” cartoon, “go bananas” is defined as “the rallying cheer at chimpanzee tech.”73 Bananas and monkeys are another favorite topic for cartoonists. Mike Twohy shows two gorillas looking at a discarded banana peel with the caption “Thank God no one was hurt!”74 Bud Grace drew a visit to the doctor by a man with a bad back. He can’t straighten up so the doctor recommends eating a bunch of bananas so that he will be able to pass for a gorilla.75 After Dennis the Menace asks Mr. Wilson why he isn’t growing bananas in his garden, Mr. Wilson calls Dennis a little monkey.76 Gary Larson used animal characters in his cartoons to expose human foibles. In one an ape says, “You know, Sid, I really like bananas … I mean, I know that’s not profound or nothin’ … Heck! We all do. But for me, I thinks it goes much more beyond that.” Monkeys are seen as sharing basic human instincts without the constraints of civilization.

  Ben and Jerry’s banana-flavored Chunky Monkey ice cream perpetuates the association between bananas and monkeys, as does the packaging for Safeway-brand Frosted Flakes breakfast cereal that features a monkey as well as a bowl of cereal with slices of banana. Newspaper advertisements for Disney’s 1997 film George of the Jungle featured a man and an ape each holding a giant banana.77 Richard Scarry’s Floating Bananas, a Little Golden Book published in 1993, features Bananas Gorilla driving his bananamobile to the harbor where he finds a banana ship unloading bunches of bananas. He is suspected of being a banana thief but turns out to be a cook who produces banana soup for the whole crew of gorillas. This book contains all the banana cliches except slipping on a peel. Monkeys and bananas are associated in the American mind with tropical climates. But somehow monkeys and mangoes or monkeys and papayas do not seem as funny. Perhaps it is the phallic associations of the banana that make this pairing humorous.

  Phallic associations are spelled out in songs such as “I Wanna Put My Banana in Your Fruit Basket” recorded by Bo Carter in 1931, “Please Don’t Squeeza da Banana” by Louis Prima, “Banana Man Blues” sung by Memphis Minnie in 1934, and “My Wife Left Town with a Banana” by Carlos Borzini, Senior. Other banana songs that have been enjoyed by twentieth-century Americans include “I Like Bananas Because They Have No Bones” recorded by Perry Weeks and his orchestra in 1936, “30,000 Pounds of Bananas” by Harry Chapin, “The Name Game” by Shirley Ellis, and “Chiquita Banana” by the King Sisters (1946), among others. In 1959 Harry Belafonte popularized “The Banana Boat Song” or “Day-O” as it is sometimes called. This was a calypso song about loading bananas onto ships at night. This song may have marked the peak of the popularity of United Fruit. It was widely sung by folksingers and parodied on a recording by Stan Freberg. The song also was featured on the Muppet Show on television in the early 1980s. [See Appendix for a list of banana songs.]

  “I Like Bananas Because They Have No Bones” sheet music (New York: Crawford Music Corporation, 1936).

  Children’s singers have found bananas to be a reliable motif. Raffi recorded “Apples and Bananas” and “Bananaphone” (1994), and Barry Louis Polisar sang “My Brother Thinks He’s a Banana” in 1977. “Bananas in Pajamas” was recorded by B1 and B2. Some more recent banana songs include “I’m Going Bananas” by Madonna (1990), “Banana Love” by the Bobs (1987), “God’s Great Banana Skin” by Chris Rea (1993), and “Banana Bobine” by The Rebels (1989). One of the oddest in this group of strange songs was “Japanese Bana
na” recorded by the Chipmunks about the unavailability of bananas in Japan.78

  In the late 1960s, the banana became a counterculture symbol. According to Freud, humor, like dreams, expresses repressed or unconscious wishes.79 In April 1967 Newsweek reported that banana-peel smoking for a psychedelic high had “touched off a banana-buying boom from the Haight-Asbury district to Harvard Square.”80 It was alleged to produce hallucinogenic states similar to LSD.81 The recipe for preparing banana peels for smoking, which began as a satire in the Berkeley Barb in March, was picked up and reprinted by New York City’s East Village Other, the Village Voice, as well as the Los Angeles Free Press. According to Time magazine, “Banana-heads scrape the white fibers from the inside of the peel, boil the scrapings into a paste, which is then baked. The dark brown ash that results is smoked in hand-rolled cigarette ‘joints’ or in pipes, tastes vaguely like a burning compost heap.”82