THE BANANA MAN
Captions to the Cartoons We Live
During prime-time in the early 60’s America was watching one show out of 3. Ed Sullivan’s show was one of those that the other 2 networks didn’t bother competing with, which means that half of America might have been watching his show for a good decade of US cultural history. But twenty years of trivia questions and 60’s retrospectives later, I have never heard anyone mention the Banana Man. This bothers me, since I have always believed him to be a major figure on the Ed Sullivan Show, and a bulwark of American culture.
All he did was pull bananas, bowling pins, and strings of sausages from a baggy coat. He only spoke one syllable - a high falsetto “WOWW!”. This “woww” of his changed from purred curiosity to a gurgle of pleasure, then excitement and astonishment. Most of his act was focussed around the “woww.” When watermelons began to overtake the stage, the Banana Man would produce a cardboard train from his pockets, load up his groceries, and ride off.
Manipulated frames of play, curiosity, and love of a “WoWW” turns the world into an act of creative arts. Discovering banal things in unexpected places. The joy of looking for anything anywhere, finding something, and then carefully creating appreciation for it. This act was a cornerstone of my childhood, but I have yet to find anyone else who remembers him. Perhaps no one was very impressed with this old clown/magic act. Perhaps I’m all wet thinking we could use more Banana Men?
Our adult need for circus, for making a vaudeville of life is apparently satisfied in the grotesque posturing of musclebound dandies on televised pro-wrestling. Clearly a medieval sideshow reviving the ancient arts of exaggeration, proclamation, and mimicry. Rome could not have produced better mock gladiatorial contests if she tried. Where else can you find the art of proclamation, or better mime?
These guys produce oracles like sausages pulled from their mouths.... oracles about the future universe of wrestling.. the real world that counts here.
Pumped with steroids, decked out in the bodies and garb of Masters of the Universe, wrestlers are the unofficial representatives of our working class alienations. A revived comedy of ancient human pomposity - mocking wealth in its glitz and sunglasses, mocking the media, mocking sport and competition, and laying waste to any justice between the good, the bad and the pimplebrain.
Wrestling should dare to come out and proclaim itself a valid modern artform, where something akin to vaudeville still lives.