.png)
For Monkey Day: On the History of Performing Monkeys
December 14 has been designated Monkey Day, and who am I to argue? By now I have done many designated posts on various animals, mostly ones known to have performed in circuses and vaudeville, or ones that have been represented, as with cartoon characters. (Peruse them here). We have been laggard in doing one on monkeys per se, though we have done posts on their great ape cousins the gorillas and chimps. Why am I only now getting around to monkeys?
It has to do with the animal itself. When I first thought of doing a post for Monkey Day a year or two ago, I noticed that there were only two vaudeville acts of note that were relevant: Galetti’s Monkeys and Wormwood’s Dogs and Monkeys. It only took a little contemplation to suss out why that might be. Monkeys sort of fall through the cracks when it comes to training and presenting animals as entertainment. They are not domesticated like horses, dogs, and elephants, nor are they as smart or as large and impressive as apes. What they are is wild, mischievous, and a pain in the neck. Friends who have encountered them while traveling in the Americas or Asia report them as pests, not unlike raccoons or squirrels, but fast, aggressive, and worst of all, possessed of opposable thumbs and large incisor teeth. So, yes, they look cute and funny in little costumes, but ya gotta do an awful lot of wrangling to put ’em through their paces.
This is not to say that they have never been taught to perform. There are those two acts I mentioned, and more of them besides (though many of the circus and vaudeville acts that use the word monkey to describe the act in fact presented chimps.) Monkeys are smart enough to train, they are simply independent minded, and, as we said, small. This makes them perfect for a performance niche that happens outside theatres, tents, and arenas. In fact it happens outside all buildings, because it happens outside. I speak of course of busking. Busking with a monkey companion is surely as old as the keeping of monkeys as pets. People do it to this day: they bring an exotic pet into a bar and place bets on whether the creature can do certain tricks or whatever. There has been a culture of performing pet monkeys in North Africa for centuries, which is why they are often accoutered in a little fez and matching vest. Abu in Disney’s Aladdin is a representation of such an animal.
Gradually pet monkeys made their way into Western Europe. I found this terrific woodcut of a mountebank and a monkey (costumes as a parrot, I think) indicating that it goes back to Medieval times.
British artist Thomas Smythe (1825-1906) painted this piece of popular and much-reproduced kitch called The Itinerant Organ Grinder with His Performing Monkey Entertaining a Small Audience circa the 1870s.
This sort of genre painting is invaluable to historians, for it tells us all kinds of things about the culture of the time. Not to imply that it would be an everyday occurrence that some traveling huckster would show up at your farm out of the blue and put on a performance for a few coppers. But it’s good to have confirmed what we who are interested in such things suspected, which is that it did happen occasionally from time to time.
But there WAS a time and a place when people saw all too MANY performing monkeys on city streets and those of Western Europe, and now we come to our headliner:
That’s right, the monkey as performing companion to an organ grinder. In the late 19th century, hand-cranked barrel organs manufactured in France and Germany became affordable to people of modest means. A limited number of tunes could be cranked out on the instrument. More elaborate ones had added features like a mechanical drum or cymbal (similar to the ones on a carousel) or some sort of amusing automaton that would move in time with the music. This still isn’t very much of a show, though — it’s basically a toy, like watching a kid play with a jack-in-the-box or something. To enhance the quality of the street performance, many organ grinders employed trained animals, usually monkeys, who would do simple tricks like tip their hat, or play the cymbals (which is the inspiration for that mechanical toy monkey that does that). Most importantly, monkeys would wield a tin cup for audience members to place coins in. Monkeys are also notorious thieves, and they probably would add to the day’s haul with little items lifted from onlookers. (I’m reminded of one of my favorite kids’ books, Esphyr SlobodkinaCaps for Sale, wherein a band of monkeys climb into a tree with a vendor’s entire inventory of chapeaux).
In New York City, this sort of street performance was especially associated with Italian immigrants starting in the 1880s, so much so that it became a stigmatizing stereotype. At one point it was estimated that 1 in 20 male Italian immigrants in New York earned his living as an organ grinder. It was regarded as being akin to begging, and sometimes there was more menace to it than that, not unlike the guys who accost you in Times Square nowadays by handing you a CD and then demanding money for it. Organ grinders were also useful as spies, touts, and stoolies. It was not a reputable line of work. In 1935 Mayor LaGuardia banned them from the streets of New York, and the whole thing passed rapidly into lore.
The souvenir image above of “Alberto and Chico” dates from more recent times, however. Friend Marie Roberts (best known as the official banner painter at Coney Island USA for many years) recognized this piece of ephemera from her youth in New York and chimed in: “Al Siegal had that organ grinder monkey act . His wife Dena (who was in a girl band with her sisters) lived in Rockaway and treated those monkeys better than many people treat their children…I knew them in their later days, late fifties early sixties when they had a stand in Gimbels basemen and Dena sold the preparations they made: “Cactus Lanzoil”. [They claimed that] it would grow hair on a lightbulb. Dena made the monkeys’ clothes and by the time I saw them in Gimbels they only had Chico, who was very small. My father would say “Dena would be rubbing Lanzoil on the monkey’s backside then would massage it into some guy’s head” (without hand washing). The little girl me was afraid of those monkeys!”
In 1983, sculptor Kay Worden (1925-2015), created this delightful statue called “The Hurdy Gurdy” as a piece of public art for the waterfront in Newport, R.I. I took this snap on a recent vacation:
Monkeys are still frequently seen as street performers around the globe. Not so much in the U.S. anymore.
As for other monkeys on Travalanche? Here are some other related posts:
and of course The Monkees
Still to come, maybe something on Curious George, and the Monkey King from the Chinese epic Journey to the West!
For more about the history of variety entertainmentplease see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.
Comments