Banana  

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Bananas (film)

An elongated curved fruit, which grows in bunches, and has a sweet creamy flesh and a smooth yellow skin.

Contents

Usage in culture

Peels

The depiction of a person slipping on a banana peel has been a staple of physical comedy for generations. A 1906 comedy record produced by Edison Records features a popular character of the time, "Cal Stewart", claiming to describe his own such incident, saying:

I don't think much of a man what throws a bananer peelin' on the sidewalk, and I don't think much of a bananer what throws a man on the sidewalk, neither. ... my foot hit that bananer peelin' and I went up in the air, and come down ker-plunk, and fer about a minnit I seen all the stars what 'stronomy tells about, and some that hain't been discovered yit. Wall jist as I was pickin' myself up, a little boy come runnin' cross the street and he said, "Oh mister, won't you please do that agin? My mother didn't see you do it."

Stereotypes

  • Because of the stereotypical image of monkeys and apes eating bananas, they have been used for racist insults, such as throwing bananas at sports players of African descent.

Arts

  • The poet Bashō is named after the Japanese word for a banana plant. The "bashō" planted in his garden by a grateful student became a source of inspiration to his poetry, as well as a symbol of his life and home.
  • The song Yes, We Have No Bananas was written by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn and originally released in 1923. Since then the song has been re-recorded several times and has been particularly popular during banana shortages.

Symbols

Bananas are also humorously used as a phallic symbol due to similarities in size and shape. This is typified by the artwork of the debut album of The Velvet Underground, which features a banana on the front cover, yet on the original LP version, the design allowed the listener to 'peel' this banana to find a pink, phallic structure on the inside.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Banana" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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