I'd like to add that I'm great at the game Boulderdash. ;)
Azaliah Yadinah-Parker - 9 years ago
If I'm not mistaken, the reason the banana peel thing is so popular in slapstick is because banana skins, like peanut shells, have been used in the past to care for hard wood floors.
Peanut shells are oily, and so peanuts would be served and their shells crunched into the boards of certain establishments so as to keep the drunken patrons from becoming hungry, irate, drunken patrons, and so that no one had to wax the floors regularly. Just sweep out the shells, and mission accomplished.
Banana skins are high in oils, too. However, when these oils become rancid they become actitone. When wax from candles, or paint or water marks or pretty much any hard to clear issue came about on your beautifully waxed, already slick, wooden floor, you could use force and risk a scuff, you could use turpentine and really make a mess of it, or you could use an old banana skin.
Banana skins aren't so dangerous today. They aren't used for this sort of thing any longer, since there are lots of supposedly superior products out there to shift stuff from a wood floor. But in vaudeville days, they were a hazard, and hence the banana peel gag was born.
Those peels on cement might not have been too dangerous. But if they were stacked, not flattened, or old enough to be separating skin from lining, then you could have slipped, indeed. Not probable, but possible.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/31135/how-did-slipping-banana-peel-become-comedy-staple
I'd like to add that I'm great at the game Boulderdash. ;)
If I'm not mistaken, the reason the banana peel thing is so popular in slapstick is because banana skins, like peanut shells, have been used in the past to care for hard wood floors.
Peanut shells are oily, and so peanuts would be served and their shells crunched into the boards of certain establishments so as to keep the drunken patrons from becoming hungry, irate, drunken patrons, and so that no one had to wax the floors regularly. Just sweep out the shells, and mission accomplished.
Banana skins are high in oils, too. However, when these oils become rancid they become actitone. When wax from candles, or paint or water marks or pretty much any hard to clear issue came about on your beautifully waxed, already slick, wooden floor, you could use force and risk a scuff, you could use turpentine and really make a mess of it, or you could use an old banana skin.
Banana skins aren't so dangerous today. They aren't used for this sort of thing any longer, since there are lots of supposedly superior products out there to shift stuff from a wood floor. But in vaudeville days, they were a hazard, and hence the banana peel gag was born.
Those peels on cement might not have been too dangerous. But if they were stacked, not flattened, or old enough to be separating skin from lining, then you could have slipped, indeed. Not probable, but possible.