- Nothing to pay
- No deductions from your compensation
- Access to UK's leading personal injury solicitors
- Excellent claim success rate
- Friendly, supportive and genuine staff
- Impartial legal advice without any cost or commitment
This requires Flash
The history of the banana skin joke
The image of the stray banana skin has become something on an emblem, however unwanted, of the accident compensation profession.
In a way it is undeniably odd and inappropriate that an old slapstick joke should be used as shorthand for solicitors who work with the sole purpose of representing the victims of accidents.
Yet, at the same time, it is also undeniable that the image is unavoidable, existing, as it has done, in popular culture for more than a century.
There are several speculative theories relating to the origin of the joke. Some say that it was simply the popularity of the bananas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and peoples' habit at the time of leaving the skins on the streets that explains the joke.
In the early 1900s Harper's Weekly warned of the new fruit craze that was littering city streets and placing the public's personal safety at risk, "Whosoever throws banana skins on the sidewalk does a great unkindness to the public, and is quite likely to be responsible for a broken limb."
Others say that bananas were simply a euphemistic prop replacement for excrement in vaudeville shows of the era. Historians tell us that it was not uncommon for people to slip in excrement, whether human or canine, and banana skins certainly a more sensible prop than poo, so this theory would seem to have some credence.
In Europe, sales and consumption of the fruit only really took off at the turn of the twentieth century, something which is reflected in the fact that Jules Verne had to describe bananas to readers when writing his 1872 classic Around the World in Eighty Days.
Verne wrote: "The guide avoided inhabited places, thinking it safer to keep the open country, which lies along the first depressions of the basin of the great river. Allahabad was now only twelve miles to the north-east. They stopped under a clump of bananas, the fruit of which, as healthy as bread and as succulent as cream, was amply partaken of and appreciated."
While in the kind of story that shows us just how lucky we are to live in an age where the socially and financially disadvantaged have access to civil redress in the form of the no win, no fee claim, The Sunday School Advocate reported on the tragic case of a man who broke his leg after slipping on a banana skin. The accident resulted in him being forced into early retirement and the ignominy of himself and his whole family being placed in a poorhouse, "All this sorrow was caused by the bit of banana peel which Miss Sweet-tooth dropped on the sidewalk."
Whatever the origins of the joke, it is one that has endured now for more than a century. From early slapstick and vaudeville to the great Benny Hill, to the "compensation culture" jokes we are now familiar with.
Perhaps that is why it serves as such useful shorthand for accident compensation professionals, because in a short, simplistic and enduring way it can be seen as a metaphor for many of the types of accident that continue to ail society today. From those in the workplace, to those on the UK's roads, we all must navigate our way around potential "banana skins", while the powers-that-be must seek to protect us from them.
