The smoking banana peel column reminded me of a Don Martin I saw in Mad decades ago. Some hippie guy was eating a banana then scraped the inside of the peel into a pot on his stove and turned on the burner under the pot. What I presume was supposed to be bananadine was placed in a pipe and the guy tried to light it. Discovering he’d been had, he angrily tossed the pipe away and proceeded to leave his kitchen, whereupon he stepped on the remains of the peel, slipped, hit his head, which put his mind in the altered state that he was after in the first place.
Are you saying that you just now got the joke?
No, I got the gist of the joke when I first read it. I was just a kid at the time so I was unable to completely understand exactly what it was about, but I got it.
I was also just a kid when I read that Don Martin strip in Mad (in 1968, if I remember right). Smoking bananas was something one heard joked about a lot at the time (in Mad, on Laugh-In and so on), but that particular strip was the first time it was ever made clear to me exactly how one went about smoking a banana! I always said Mad was educational…
(I need an Alfred E. Neuman smiley to go here!)