Recently my colleague John “Jokie” Jokeson came over to brainstorm ideas for a short comedy film he is hoping to produce. It went like this:
Shorten Humourless (SH): Hi Jokie, what’s new?
JJ: Good to see you Shorten. I’ve got a great new comedy idea and you’re the perfect sounding board. You live up to your name. Humourless by name and humourless by nature. You reflect my ideas with so little innate sense of humour that you force me to push the envelope further into wilder plot ideas, more absurd exaggerations and even more painful puns.
SH: You mean I’m your straight man – I’m Dean Martin to your Jerry Lewis, Agent 99 to your Maxwell Smart?
JJ: More like Dr Watson to my Sherlock Holmes, your dullness causing my own brilliance to flash more vividly.* If you think something is funny then anyone will find it funny.
SH: So what’s your supposedly brilliant humour idea today?
JJ: Banana skins. “Banana peel appeal” is my working title.
SH: Mmm – pun in the title – isn’t the pun the lowest form of humour?
JJ: No, that’s sarcasm. Puns are the second lowest form.
SH: Puns in film titles … let’s see there’s “Ratatouille” about a chef who happens to be a rat or there’s “The Aristocats” about a noble cat called Duchess and her kittens. But they were films with cute little animals and that always gets a laugh. What’s funny about banana skins?
JJ: Just think about it Shorten. What made Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton famous? Banana skin gags – someone stepping on a banana peel and falling flat on their back, or better still, avoiding stepping on a banana peel then falling down an open manhole.
SH: But that was 100 years ago.
JJ: But the humour is timeless … and funny.
SH: Banana Cream pie in the eye kind of humour?
JJ: Exactly. I can see you’re catching on. I want the film to have broad appeal to our funny bones, and to our social consciences.
SH: The old social justice through comedy idea? Like Huckleberry Finn?
JJ: Exactly!
SH: Pity you’re not Mark Twain. So what are the scenes you’ve dreamt up, all strung together with banana skins?
JJ: First there’s a mystery: about a dodgy backyard car mechanic who gets daily deliveries of boxes of bananas but throws away the bananas and keeps the skins.
SH: What for?
JJ: For stuffing inside grinding gearboxes so that they’re smooth and silent for long enough to sell the car.
SH: But that’s deceptive and criminal!
JJ: Crime comedy works too you know! The 1960’s Batman TV series was a hoot! Besides, dodgy mechanics using banana skins are no worse than you cleaning your fingernails and dressing yourself in a suit for a job interview to give a superficial impression of competence. And remember, I want to portray the dodgy backyard mechanic as an oppressed victim of prejudice – he only strays outside the law to pay the medical bills for his chronically sick daughter.
SH: You’re crazy.
JJ: Crazy funny I hope.
SH: OK, that’s one scene. What else? Something we can all relate to, I hope, not bananas in gearboxes .
JJ: Sure, next there’s a scene with a bunch of gorillas who are eating bananas.
SH: That doesn’t sound funny. Apes do eat bananas, everyone knows that.
JJ: But it’s what they do next that’s funny.
SH: Like what? Don’t tell me it’s wearing the peel as hats.
JJ: That’s right! Now you’re getting the idea!
SH: That’s been done to death by every cartoonist ever.
JJ: But wait! Then one of them gathers all the banana peels and piles them on the top of his head and struts around like a human model on a catwalk with the others applauding and grunting and screeching.
SH: I think you’ll have the animal cruelty people suing you.
JJ: But the gorilla made the hat as a joke, mocking their cruel human oppressors. It’s a role reversal, like wild west bank robbers being thrown off into the creek by their socially aware horses. Except in this case it’s gorillas with banana peel hats.
SH: Socially aware horses…. OK, what else?
JJ: There’s a scene in a natural remedies shop. For every ailment the prescription is always banana skins in some form or another.
SH: Like what?
JJ: Acne on your face? Tape banana peel to your skin, slimy side down, for 24 hours.
SH: Embarrassing.
JJ: And funny, when the patients try to explain to their friends why they have banana peel attached to their faces.
SH: That sounds as funny as a sword swallowing act.
JJ: Next, to appeal to more sophisticated audience members, we will have a business commentator doing a TV news summary using banana skin analogies.
SH: So exactly how will you bring banana skins into business stories?
JJ: It’s happening already. Here are some articles I found online. This one said that “In today’s economic climate, for the novice investor, financial slip-ups are just a banana skin away”.
Another one said “Nation X dodged the banana skin of the GFC stock market crash only to disappear down a manhole of bad debt a few years later”.
Think of a whole TV news business report littered with banana skin references. But I’ve saved the best scene for the end.
SH: I can hardly wait.
JJ: Cynical Shorten, very cynical. Anyway it is widely reported that after marathon cycling races or running races the tracks are covered with …
SH: Banana skins?
JJ: That’s right! The track looks like a garbage dump. The competitors say they eat the bananas on the run for energy and that the skins would weigh them down, and they don’t have anywhere to stow them in their little lycra suits so they throw them away.
SH: And?
JJ: Research tells us that the competitors do it so that their rivals will slip over on the skins and hopefully cause a pile up so that the banana peel throwers will finish in the top 10.
It will make great action scenes – all those banana skins and all those pile-ups and the peel throwers laughing like hyenas all the way to the finish line. It will be a riot, like having a hundred Charlie Chaplins.
SH: Let’s see, there’s second-hand car engines stuffed with banana skins, gorillas modelling banana skin hats, dodgy prescriptions of banana skin poultices, banana skin journalism and cyclists being pelted with banana skins by other cyclists. It will give bananas a bad name.
JJ: There should be no sacred cows when it comes to comedy.
SH: I thought this was about bananas, not bovines.
JJ: But funny, right? ………………………………
SH: ….. Got any other ideas?
++++
* A. Conan Doyle The Adventure of the Creeping Man
© Geoff Milton 2022
