For years I tried to tell people about The Banana Man and no one knew what I was talking about, so I’m grateful that YouTube has made his act retrievable. Early TV was full of vaudeville leftovers — plate spinners, animal acts, and especially clowns, many of whom, like Emmett Kelly, were silent and sentimental and thus easy for children like me to enjoy. But I regarded The Banana Man with horror. He observed the usual clown proprieties by being non-verbal, but he did vocalize, constantly, with shrill, wordless trilling and gargled cries of “wow.” I recognized this not as a comic trope but as the helpless emissions of a disordered mind. Maybe I’d seen a bum doing something like that; I know that when, years later, I saw homeless people singing or muttering to themselves, outwardly cheerful but still clearly deranged, they made me think of The Banana Man. Or maybe it was the churning of my own mind that The Banana Man reflected back to me, and that was what horrified me — that even though I was trying to be good and washing my hands and combing my hair and behaving myself in public, I was, in some way, a Banana Man myself.
And of course his front pockets were always spewing bananas.
