Barrel of Monkeys: How fun is it Really?
First, let's look at these two items independently: I think that barrels can be quite useful for a variety of purposes such as storing things or rolling down a hill, but are they fun? I don't really think so. Monkeys, on the other hand, can definitely be a real crack-up, but how would they react to being in such a confined space with their colleagues? I have my doubts as to the outcome of such a proposal.
All-in-all I would have to say that monkeys in a barrel has some potential, but it likely wouldn't last long. The monkeys would all be in each other's faces and there would be a lot of funny sounds. However, in the end, there just isn't enough room in a typical barrel for the monkeys to really get much fun going. Unless you have a really ginormous barrel the fun factor wouldn't get very high, in my opinion.
Then again there is only one way to find out for sure what the overall fun factor of monkeys in a barrel would be. If you have any experiences with monkeys in barrels, or know of any similar experiments, please let me know.
posted by Jeremy at
11:54 AM
2 Comments:
In order to truly understand how such a phrase could have come about, there needs to be more qualifications in the statement 'more fun than a barrel of monkeys'. For instance, is the barrel completely sealed? If it is, are there air holes? For now, this leaves three possibilities.
Let's examine the first possibility, monkeys (let's say three) in an unsealed barrel. After putting the monkeys in the barrel, I would imagine they would simply run out. While this can be funny to watch, what makes the barrel so special? The barrel more or less adds nothing significant, so the statement may as well have been 'More fun than monkeys' if this were the case. Therefore, I do not believe this was the situation that spawned the phrase.
The second possibility is three monkeys in a barrel with no air holes. While there may be some fun to be had initially, this wouldn't be fun in the end because the monkeys would die and then they would smell bad, and nobody likes things that smell bad. This makes me think that this also was likely not the situation that spawned the phrase.
The final idea is three monkeys in a sealed barrel, with air holes. Now this I can imagine being fun. Just imagine all the noise they would make initially! Also, think of all the fun things you can with the barrel, such as rolling it off of cliffs or into traffic and spraying water into the air holes with a hose. You can also keep the monkeys alive by feeding them through the holes. The geniuses who originally coined this phrase must have been doing something along these lines. Just thinking about it makes me smile!
This concludes my thorough analysis on the origins of the phrase 'more fun than a barrel of monkeys'.
By
Anonymous, at 1:51 PM
You guys think too hard.
It's just a toy
By
Anonymous, at 3:07 PM
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