The Banana Peel: Funny or Deadly? By Alan Borer

  We all know it: the comic strip, cartoon, movie, or internet meme that shows a person slipping on a banana peel, usually with comedic results.  So universal, that banana peel, but does it ever happen in real life?             

It happened at least once in World War I era Westerville.  In the fall of 1918, just before the Armistice, a resident of the town was injured in just that way:

You will regret to learn that Mr. Vondersmith had a very painful accident a few days before I went to Detroit.  He slipped on the sidewalk on a banana peeling and cut his head, bruised his eyes, broke two fingers and injured his knee-cap; probably broke it.[i]

Bananas were unknown in America until the mid nineteenth century.   One of the earliest importers of bananas was Carl B. Frank, who brought the fruit from Panama to New York. They quickly caught on as a snack food, but also developed a reputation as a nuisance because people threw the peels pretty much anywhere they pleased.  City officials hoped that the wild pigs which roamed the streets of New York would curtail the mounting banana peel problem, but the pigs did not develop a taste for peels.  It took a retired colonel, George Waring, to organize the city’s first municipal composting facility, and a platoon of street sweepers to wrestle the banana menace under control.

            As the century ended, bananas were developing a reputation not only as fodder, but as a pedestrian danger.  Sunday schools warned of their danger, but at the same time the peel was morphing into the prince of pratfalls.  Vaudeville comedian “Sliding” Billy Watson popularized the gag early in the century; film stars Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton were using banana-peel-slips by 1921, Laurel and Hardy used an errant peel to start a pie fight in 1927’s talkie The Battle of the Century.  The banana peel still shows up as a deus ex machina on television and the internet when physical comedy needs a reason.

            Are banana peels that dangerous?  Researchers are divided, but some of them delving into the issue have suggested that rotten, slimy, week-old bananas are quite slippery.   New, yellow but not overripe bananas are still starchy and not as slippery.  The paradox is that old bananas do not photograph well.  The most photogenic banana is not as slippery as the sticky old gutter banana.[ii]  In a comedy movie, seeing is more important than texture.

            Otterbein College president Walter G. Clippinger, the source of the above quote, seems not to have actually seen Mr. Vondersmith’s fall.  Even if he did, I’m sure the President was much too polite to laugh.  At least in this instance the banana peel was a threat, not a joke. Like so many scenes in our lives, it is only funny looking back.  Just ask “Sliding” Billy Watson.

-Alan Borer

[i]W. G. Clippinger to R. E. Penick, October 12, 1918. Presidential Papers, WGC, Box 115, file 1.

[ii]Laura Turner Garrison, “How Did Slipping on a Banana Peel Become a Comedy Staple?” Mental Floss (https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31135/how-did-slipping-banana-peel-become-comedy-staple), July 9, 2012