According to the Chinese zodiac, it's been the "Year of the Goat" since last February, and we're getting pretty tired of the nonstop goat-related festivities. Luckily, the lunar new year this month begins the "Year of the Monkey," so the future looks bright. But Jeopardy!'s Ken Jennings tells us that a lot of stuff we thought we knew about our mischievous treetop friends is just bananas. All month, he'll be here to put a stop to all the monkey business.
The Debunker: Is Curious George a Monkey?
"What a nice little monkey!" thinks the Man with the Yellow Hat, when he first meets his famous friend in the 1941 children's classic Curious George. Then he picks George up, stuffs him in a bag, and takes him out of Africa on a boat. "George was sad, but he was still a little curious," authors Margret and Hans Rey tell us, in what today seems to be some kind of super-problematic take on colonialism or animal abuse or slavery or something.
The Reys, who actually escaped Nazi-occupied Paris on homemade bikes in 1940, carrying with them the first Curious George manuscript, always referred to George as a monkey. His creation was almost certainly inspired by the two marmoset monkeys that the Reys themselves kept as pets when they lived in Brazil in the 1930s. But I'm going to quibble with George's own creators here. I don't think he's a curious little monkey. In fact, I don't think he's a monkey at all.
Most prominently, George has no tail. Now there are some species of macaque monkey that have vestigial little tail stubs, like the Barbary macaque of Algeria and Morocco, but George looks nothing like them. In fact, with his upright posture, hairless face and hands, and longer forelimbs than hind limbs, he's pretty clearly drawn to look like a chimpanzee. By common scientific definition, chimps are not monkeys, which usually have long tails, unlike the apes, who don't. Maybe the Reys are following the looser dictionary definition of monkey: any "nonhuman primate mammal with the exception usually of the lemurs and tarsiers." In other words, they know he's a chimp, they're just calling him a monkey colloquially. But you know what? I don't give a hoot what the Reys thought. I bravely stand with the scholars of the New Criticism movement, who believed (in the words of critic W. K. Wimsatt) that "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art." Curious George looks like a chimp, dammit. Who are you going to believe, the author or your own eyes?
Quick Quiz: In Curious George Goes to the Hospital, our hero receives urgent medical care because he unwisely decides to swallow what?
Ken Jennings is the author of six books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.