Banana peels

Does anybody know why comic strips and cartoons always portray banana peels as being slippery when stepped on? Where did this come from? I have never heard of ANYBODY slipping and falling because they happened to step on a banana peel.

I never used to believe that you could slip on a banana peel. Then one day in a parking lot I felt my foot skid and narrowly averted falling on my ass. Looked down, and there it was…an old rotten banana peel.

That being said, it’s got to be rare. Maybe it was more common in the old days, when urban areas could get kind of filthy and fruit peels littered the streets.

When I was in college, just like most college students, I had too much too on my hands. As an avid cartoon fan, I’d wondered about this myself.

We took a banana peel and tried it both ways (yellow side up and yellow side down) on the carpet. Nothing. Stuck to the carpet like glue.

Then we tried it in my dorm room, which had a linoleum floor. With the yellow side up, it seemed like it was stuck to the floor. So, we washed the floor with some water and dried it, put the peel down yellow side up again, and I got a running start and ran up to it and jumped on it with one foot…

That banana peel went zipping out from under me like you wouldn’t believe…I went flying forward and jammed my foot under the refrigerator and just about broke my ankle. I’m screaming in agony while one of my roommates is just laughing hysterically at the whole scene. (So, as long as he’s alive, I do have someone to verify the story.)

So, it definitely is possible, although it’s obviously more likely to happen on linoleum than, say, a gravel driveway. I think the reality is that, while you may slip a bit, you are fairly unlikely to be actually injured, because only one foot will be slipping. It’s not like being on ice where you don’t have traction with either foot.