Sometimes old sayings need clever updates. For instance, “Don’t flagellate a deceased equine” is a thinking person’s “Don’t beat a dead horse,” meaning stop talking about the same issue.
Or, “More entertaining than a passel of primates” to replace “More fun than a barrel of monkeys.”
This latter comparison intrigued me so I decided to research it since most of us have never seen a “barrel of monkeys” or even monkeys outside of a zoo enclosure.
Similar to many of these old sayings, this one began in a slightly different phrasing as a “cage full of monkeys” in 1840 then by the 1890s as a “wagon load of monkeys.”
At that point, it became “more fun than a barrel of monkeys,” implying the playful behavior of these primates.
Just a few years later, French mathematician Emile Borel (whose specialty was hyperbolic geometry and special relativity) used monkeys as primary characters in his research — note, he was not a zoologist.
His treatise was “Mecanique Statistique et Irreversibilite.” Liberally translated this meant “These little guys are funny and I got a big grant from the government.” No, that’s not true (I don’t think).
He proposed (in French too long to type) “Let us imagine a million monkeys typing haphazardly on typewriters …” I’m not certain what came from his research; perhaps a lot of happy monkeys with extra banana rations.
However, it was the predecessor of the “Infinite Monkey Theorem,” which believes that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will likely write something worth reading. It probably wouldn’t take an infinite amount of time for one to produce this column.
But, just think of an office with a million monkeys sitting in cubicles behind computer keyboards with spell-correct typing away — wait, I’ve just described a large office in today’s business world before the pandemic.
One has only to return to the last century to find a scientist curious enough to test the original premise.
In 1938, the Milwaukee Journal ran an article titled “Zoo Curator to Live on Island with 50 Monkeys for Medical Experiments.” The outrageous headline was followed by this piece: “If anything is ‘more fun than a barrel of monkeys’ it must be a whole island of monkeys with a few apes thrown in for good measure. And if anyone is capable of raising monkeys and apes on an island and deriving amusement and useful knowledge therefrom, it would be Primatologist Michael I. Tomilin, whose gruff and dour Russian exterior masks a rich fund of wit and an unusual aptitude for scientific ‘monkey business’.”
I don’t know how that experiment turned out. Apparently he wasn’t interested in their typing skills and I’ve discovered no significant publications by a monkey ghost writer from that period.
I have observed some writing in the last few years that might have emanated from writers of that school.
However, with no recent form of reference, I did run across a description of a late 19th century Republican convention in Syracuse, New York, that stated the affair was “more fun than a barrel of monkeys.” Although I’ve not attended any, I don’t believe recent conventions have approached that level of jollity.
Well, fun is where you find it regardless of the number of monkeys reporting an event.
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November 21, 2021 at 06:05AM
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Trivially Speaking: From a cage to a wagon load to a ‘barrel of monkeys’ - Loveland Reporter-Herald
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