History by television: The dumbing of America

Yesterday, while standing in the checkout line of the grocery store, I overheard the conversation between the checker, and the young guy in front of me. The checker was commenting on how everyone that had passed through her stand had banana's.

She and the young man chuckled over the trend, and then the young man shared some information he had just learned. He told her about how he had watched the Three Stooges the previous night, and that in one scene they noticed some bananas, and were perplexed over this odd yellow fruit.

He went on to tell her that their interest was because nobody had really seen bananas before, they were new to the US.

At this point, I was intrigued that this young man confused farcical with factual. And I decided to look into this a little more, since I knew his statement was just a little, well, wrong.

In 1871, a railroad across Costa Rica was built by a Brooklynite named Minor Keith. He planted banana trees as he built his railroad, and imported bananas into the US. By 1898, Americans were consuming 16 million bunches a year.

The Three Stooges act started in the 1920's, nearly fifty years after bananas made their appearance in the US. So they would have been well aware of the banana.

It was a sad moment, to see that someone was deriving his history from a tv show, and one that was designed for silliness, at that. It was more disturbing that he felt so sure of his deduction that he shared it as fact publicly. If the checker has any sense, she'll question his info, and do the research. If not, she'll share it with others, who'll share it with others, and so on, until it becomes folklore.

And maybe one day we'll find it entered in Snopes.