Banana
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Featured:  Illustration: Portrait fantaisiste du marquis de Sade (1866) by H. Biberstein |
An elongated curved fruit, which grows in bunches, and has a sweet creamy flesh and a smooth yellow skin.
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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.
