A fellow who signs his e-mails "youngblood" wants to know...
Any idea why a comedian is referred to as a "top banana?" Does it have anything to do with slipping on banana peels?
Nope. It dates back to an old burlesque sketch that was performed by just about every funny person who got onto those stages. You have three comedians on stage. One is standing there with two bananas. The other two enter and one says, "What do you have there?" Comic #1 says, "I have three bananas."
Comic #2 says, "I beg your pardon, kind sir, but as any fool can plainly see, you have but two bananas there." (I'm giving you the quickie version of this. Most acts would draw this all out for five or ten minutes.)
"No," says Comic #1. "I have three bananas here. Watch and I'll demonstrate." He holds up one banana and announces, "One banana have I." He then holds up the second banana and says, "Two bananas have I." He then concludes, "One banana and two bananas make three bananas!"
Comic #2 says, "Let me see those" and snatches them away from him. He then does the same math: "One banana have I...two bananas have I...one banana and two bananas makes three bananas. By gosh, he's right."
Then Comic #3 tries it and gets the same answer. They go back and forth for a while, all of them amazed that what the naked eye perceives as two bananas is actually three bananas, at least if you count them that way. Finally, Comic #2 takes one of the bananas, Comic #3 takes the other and they start to walk off stage, eating them. Comic #1 yells after them, "Hey, what about me?"
And they yell back at him, "You eat the third banana!" Blackout. End of skit.
This routine was done so often that folks began to refer to the lead comic as the First Banana, the secondary comic as the Second Banana and so on. Those were the terms used in vaudeville and burlesque. In the fifties, when Johnny Mercer sat down to write a song for the proposed musical starring Phil Silvers, he started on a tune to be called "First Banana," then decided that "Top Banana" made for a better lyric. So he changed it and it caught on...and that's how the term came to be.
I should have brought up the topic of this movie earlier in the week because Turner Classic Movies aired it on Wednesday night. But if you're dying to see it, fear not. They're running it again in early January. And if you want to see the title song, you can view a clip of it right now, right here.
In 1951, the great Phil Silvers starred on Broadway in a musical comedy called Top Banana. It was all about a high-pressure comedian who made the shift from vaudeville to the (then) new medium of television. At the time, Milton Berle was the most prominent star who'd made that transition...and there were aspects of the character that certainly seemed to be based on Uncle Miltie. When Berle found out about the project, he insisted on investing in it, and thereafter did little to discourage the notion that it was based on him, even though the role Silvers played was a pretty unpleasant guy.
Hy Kraft wrote the book and the legendary Johnny Mercer penned the songs. Rose Marie and Jack Albertson were in the cast and the whole thing got pretty good reviews...so good that many were surprised it didn't do more business. It ran a little less than a year in New York and then toured to modest success. It has rarely been revived since then. No one has ever been interested in seeing it if it doesn't have Phil Silvers in it. (There have been occasional rumors that it will be resurrected with Nathan Lane in the lead but there are rumors of every show that ever played Broadway being revived with Nathan Lane in the lead. Me, I'm waiting to see him play Annie...and don't think he won't.)
All the major movie studios passed on committing Top Banana to film. Then, when the touring version was in Los Angeles, Silvers was approached directly by producer Alfred Zugsmith, who was then (and excepting the later Touch of Evil, still is) known primarily for cheapo horror and sex films. Zugsmith proposed a deal to, in essence, film the touring show with most of the same cast, sets, costumes, arrangements, etc. The idea was to do it low-budget and quick in 3-D and rush the film to market while there was still a big demand out there for 3-D movies. Silvers and his producers agreed and Top Banana was photographed in just a few weeks, essentially by restaging the Broadway show in a movie studio and pointing cameras at it.
But as fast as they got it done, it wasn't fast enough. The film was shot in July of '53 but by September when editing was completed, its tentative distributor dropped it, citing a plunging marketplace for 3-D movies. Zugsmith and his crew eventually got a distribution deal the following February for a "flat" version that seemed cheap, even for an Alfred Zugsmith movie. They'd been counting on the three-dimensional gimmick to make up for the shoddy production values...and now they were all there on the screen in two dimensions. A murky conversion from the 3-D negatives didn't help, either.
Mr. Silvers was embarrassed by the film at the time and he'd be really humiliated by the versions around today which are blurry and missing around fifteen minutes. The movie was never exhibited in 3-D and apparently never will be, as no 3-D print is known to exist. But a copy of the trailer in that format has survived and has been restored...and guess what today's video link is! If you have a pair of red/green 3-D glasses around, run and get 'em 'cause here it is...
This whole little outrage over Barack Obama bowing to Japan's Emperor Akihito is another one of those "whatever he does is a scandal" phony controversies. Even viewers of Fox News and self-identified Republicans don't think it's inappropriate for our president to do that. Right-wing bloggers called it "treasonous," which to me is one of those frequent (these days) cases of defining an important word down to the point of rendering it meaningless. If you call a respectful greeting to a foreign leader "treason," what word would you use if someone handed that foreign leader our nuclear codes and, say, the actual Liberty Bell?
November 19, 2009
