{"id":80938,"date":"2014-12-17T13:30:15","date_gmt":"2014-12-17T18:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=80938"},"modified":"2014-12-17T14:22:04","modified_gmt":"2014-12-17T19:22:04","slug":"gags-and-novelties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/17\/gags-and-novelties\/","title":{"rendered":"Gags and Novelties"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Banana_Peel\"<\/a>

Illustration: Max Ronnersj\u00f6<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

\u201cDo we need tea?\u201d she echoed. \u201cBut Miss Lathbury \u2026 \u201d She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realise that my question had struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind. \u2015Barbara Pym,\u00a0Excellent Women<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We have all experienced such \u201clandslides of the mind\u201d: moments that upend everything we thought we knew or believed, everything that made us feel secure. These are the moments when we grow up\u2014or resolutely refuse to. They are the moments that define us. In my case, it was the moment, in middle school, when I saw someone actually slip on a banana peel.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019d asked me in the minutes\u2014days\u2014years before it happened, I would have scoffed at the very notion. I knew certain things as facts: The sky was blue. Everyone died. People slipping on banana peels were not funny. My certainty was so obvious as not to require conscious thought; and yet, in a sense, it underlay so many of my assumptions about comedy, sophistication, and human nature itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As a child I was in the habit of listening to the 1918\u00a0Prokofiev opera\u00a0Love for Three Oranges\u00a0<\/em>(dramatized for kids by the peerless\u00a0Ann Rachlin<\/a>), in which a prince has fallen into a melancholy from too much\u00a0tragic poetry; the only cure is laughter. Yet all the most amusing clowns and jesters in the land fail to coax forth so much as a smile. It is only when the evil witch Fata Morgana falls over and exposes her underpants that the melancholy prince is roused to helpless mirth, and his life is saved. <\/p>\n

Even in my earliest memories, I found this quite implausible and utterly unfunny. (The princesses trapped in enormous oranges was less of a stretch, apparently.) I was someone who \u201cdid not like\u201d slapstick. This is who I was.<\/p>\n

And then came that moment in the cafeteria. Someone had left a banana peel\u2014outer side up\u2014on the floor. A boy carrying a laden tray stepped on the banana peel and\u2014yes!\u2014skidded several feet, tray and food flying, arms flailing, legs thrown cartoonishly into the air. And like the melancholy prince, like a small child, like a Bruegel peasant, I guffawed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Was it \u201cfunny?\u201d I don\u2019t know. It was pure. It was pure human enjoyment of someone else\u2019s misery and absurdity. And in the shocked minutes afterward, as people applauded and jeered and helped that boy clean up, I realized: I don\u2019t know anything<\/em>. Maybe it\u2019s hilarious when someone gets pie\u2019d. Maybe clowns have their place, and whoopee cushions, too.\u00a0Maybe I like The Three Stooges.<\/em>\u00a0And then reality reasserted itself and I hid from that which challenged me. Maybe I drank tea; I was probably too young.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cDo we need tea?\u201d she echoed. \u201cBut Miss Lathbury \u2026 \u201d She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realise that my question had struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind. \u2015Barbara Pym,\u00a0Excellent Women We have all experienced such \u201clandslides of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[12528,16403,3528,412,16404,14349,16407,16406,9045,16003,16405],"class_list":["post-80938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-accidents","tag-banana-peels","tag-barbara-pym","tag-comedy","tag-goofs","tag-middle-school","tag-physical-comedy","tag-pratfalls","tag-schadenfreude","tag-slapstick","tag-slips"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nYou Wouldn\u2019t Think Slipping on a Banana Peel Is Funny, But \u2026<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein revisits a classic comic trope to see if it lives up its reputation.\" 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