The fat lady and the banana

According to an often retold anecdote, once in the 1930s Charlie Chaplin had a short conversation with renown screenwriter Charles MacArthur:

“How could I make a fat lady, walking down Fifth Avenue, slip on a banana peel and still get a laugh?” said MacArthur. “Do I show first the banana peel, then the fat lady approaching; then she slips? Or do I show the fat lady first, then the banana peel, and then she slips?”

“Neither,” said Charlie. “You show the fat lady approaching; then you show the banana peel; then you show the banana peel and the fat lady together; then she steps over the banana peel and disappears down a manhole.”

This conversation might or might not have taken place between them, but it seems to have got very popular among anecdote tellers. David Niven includes it in his autobiography (x) and the snippet I cited here was written by American author Clifton Fadiman (x).

The following version, by Chuck Jones (x), is so extended and dramatized that it’s quite impossible to believe that these were Charlie’s own words. Anyway, it’s highly entertaining.

Two stage writers decided to test Chaplin: “Let’s nail him with something very difficult in the way of comic business. Let’s take about the biggest chestnut we can find,” So they cornered Chaplin one day and said, “How would you make comic business out of a fat lady and a banana peel?” 

They thought he’d say he wouldn’t bother with anything like that, but he said, “You can make comic business out of anything. Let’s analyze it. First of all, decide about how much time you’re going to spend. Let’s say, half a minute on it. Second of all, you have to make everybody dislike her if she’s going to get in trouble. So you pick her up, say, on Fifth Avenue, walking along, and she has an umbrella or a nasty little dog or something that immediately says she’s not socially acceptable. She pokes people with umbrellas or her dog snaps at people. But she has the right of way, by God. You get that feeling from her. Now that can be done very quickly. Once you have established that you’ll get a minor laugh then because the audience WANTS her to come to some sort of a problem. You zoom your camera ahead and pick up a banana peel lying on the sidewalk. Then you cut to her being mean again, intercutting shots. Get an angle shot from the banana peel down onto the pavement, looking across the banana peel, seeing her approach the banana peel (this is a good dramatic shot.) You do a series of fast intercuts, increasing your pace as you go.” “We’re approaching this peel closer and closer. You cut to the banana peel, she walks in, steps OVER the banana peel,and falls into a manhole.”

(First posted on my blog in January 2016)