One earlier thread, which has further references to other threads. To date, some good discussion, but nothing conclusive.
I was watching a documentary about Jackie Gleason, and they showed this photo, taken probably early 1940s. Gleason is holding up his hand with fingers outstretched behind someone’s head. Possibly it’s just coincidence, and he’s just doing it to wave at the camera. But possibly that’s a forerunner of the two fingers sign. Just a thought.
What’s the question?
I’ve always heard that “bunny ears” are an extension of cuckold’s horns, although that may well be apocryphal.
It’s just bunny ears. People seem to be overcomplicating this.
I don’t understand why you’d say this. We have a longstanding cultural tradition of making a specific gesture when being photographed. Other cultures do not do this. Our behavior is unusual and, it would seem, unmotivated, and yet it is persistent across several generations. How is it overcomplicating to ask why?
More specifically, I’d ask: (1) Why use any gesture at all? (2) What does it mean to contemporary users? (3) Where did this particular gesture originate? So far, we’ve only half-answered #2 with “bunny ears.” But we still haven’t established why people think it’s worth doing this, rather than the much easier nothing at all.
The hypothesis (which I suspect goes back to Desmond Morris) for #3 is that it’s an adaptation of an older, insulting gesture referencing cuckoldry. It’s a reasonable hypothesis, and it should be easy enough to check whether the same gesture once meant “cuckold” as the so-called “devil’s horns” and “fico” did. It’s also possible that, even if the gesture is the same, that it’s not a continuous tradition, that this context is completely unrelated. I’ll see if I can find anything.
It combines attention seeking with the ancient human art of mockery - what more is there to understand?
Lots of other cultures do it as much as we do. The Japanese for instance.
I think it’s because it’s mildly funny to make it look like someone has bunny ears when they don’t.
Okay, the Japanese. But it’s not universal.
And why only rabbit ears? Why not miming a gun to the temples, or moose antlers, or something else? It’s not the burning question of the ages, but I just don’t think “we do it ’cause it’s funny” is a satisfying explanation.
Well, to get any satisfactory answer, we’d need a large sample of instances where this has happened to see if there is any correlation between the type of people who do it, the circumstances it is done in and the type of person having it done to them.
Just for starters.
That photo looks like they’re all flashing the peace / Victory sign, and the girl in front is leaning down and to the centre and bunny-earing herself by accident.
Not to say that the Japanese don’t do it, just that that image may not really be displaying it.
When I was in elementary school (New Orleans, 1970s), we’d put the two fingers (bunny ears/victory sign) over someone’s head when they weren’t looking (so not just for photo-taking) and count until they realized that you were doing this. The number you reached until they noticed you doing it was supposed to be the number of girlfriends/boyfriends they would have.
It would be hard to do those other gestures without the victim seeing you do it. The beauty of rabbit ears is that the victim is unaware until he sees the picture.
Although on second thought, if you’re standing behind someone in a group picture, you could do moose antlers without the victim catching on. The photographer would probably notice it, though, while rabbit ears are easily overlooked.
The Japanese habit of flashing the peace sign in photographs is well known, and I’d agree that it has little to do with the “bunny ears” gesture in most cases. The wiki article on the sign gives a (possibly spurious) origin for the Japanese custom:
It’s not just in pictures, for them. When I was in Japan, and especially on Okinawa (where they presumably aren’t as used to seeing gai jin), people flashed the peace sign at us constantly. Several times, people would fight traffic to pull up next to us on the road and flash the peace sign. It was hilarious. And awesome.
We used to do the make-the-sign-and-count thing, too (San Diego, 1970s).
I think it’s clear that the synchronic interpretation is straightforward. It’s a gesture of mild mockery, explained as rabbit ears. It’s the origins that are unclear, and the origins are what shaped the current form.
/ (/ = finger, # = fist)
But it could just have easily been the devil-horn gesture
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or the middle finger
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or anything else. How was this gesture was selected? It may not be knowable. I can’t find the answer, though I did read an interesting article on thumb gestures in ancient Rome.
Using both hands, it’s possible to effectively bunny-ear two people at once.
That’s bunny ears? Only if the bunny is Bongo.
Heh, I always thought it was devil’s horns not bunny ears.
This is it. Occam’s Razor and all that. It’s just fun to make your friends look silly.
BTW, in the Gleason picture, I noticed the woman in the background also appears to be waving, so it’s probably just an unfortunate camera angle that makes the man in the foreground look as if Gleason is mocking hiom.
Thanks for the back-up, cochrane. 
I’ve thought of another possible reason for the bunny-ears though - most, if not all of the time, the person it is being done to will be chatting to someone else, or “rabbiting”, so if you can find the origins of that expression being used for excessive chatter, you might have your first culprits.
