Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a monkey named Sigmund. He lived in a jungle called Jayne. Sigmund was a clever little dude. He was always thinking of exciting new things to do. Unfortunately, he had no friends. Until one day, when he was eating bananas, another little monkey swung over to him.
“Hi my name is George,” he said.
“Hi George, I’m Sigmund. Will you be my friend?”
“Yes, because I have no friends,” George replied.
“Great! Do you like bananas?” Sigmund inquired.
“Oh yeah. They are so yummy. I love to peel them. It’s the most fun part!”
“Peeling bananas is great. It’s also a lot of fun to swing on tree branches to get them!!” Sigmund smiled as George laughed.
“Too bad not a lot of bananas grow on one tree, and when you only live in one tree, that’s all the bananas you get,” George raised his eyebrows, “you know what I mean?”
Sigmund nodded, “Yeah, I know what you mean. It stinks.”
“Yeah but what can we do about it? We can’t steal other bananas!”
A devilish grin swept across the face of Sigmund. “Oh yeah? Why can’t we? Do bananas have monkeys’ names on them?”
“No, but each monkey is entitled to those bananas that of which are on his own tree,” George said unsurely.
“But, my friend, it never says we aren’t entitled to other bananas too!” Sigmund smiled again.
“Hey what the heck! If it means getting more bananas I suppose I’m all for it!” George nodded his head in confidence.
“Well, then what are we waiting for? Let’s go get us some bananas!” Sigmund said somewhat loudly.
“Shhh! We have to be silent, and we can’t let anyone see us! If we get caught we will be in big trouble!” George pointed his finger at Sigmund.
“Oh, okay, okay. You take a few bananas from those trees,” Sigmund pointed his finger to the left, “and I’ll take the ones this way,” and pointed to the right.
“Aye, aye captain!” George saluted.
The two monkeys, happy as can be, went about swinging from tree to tree, being careful not to be seen. They each swiped five bananas that day.
Deciding that they were pretty good at this banana business, they made up their minds to continue banana stealing each day, always being quiet and careful not to be seen from the mommy and daddy monkeys.
Every day Sigmund and George would take three to five bananas and took them back to one of their trees to peel and eat. Getting better and better at it, they started to not try as hard. After all, they were so good at not getting caught, they figured they didn’t need to be so quiet and sneaky any more.
Ten years later: The monkey pair, now being teenagers, kept up the tradition every morning. One day, they got so careless, neither of them tried to be either sneaky or quiet. They swung from tree to tree, showing off and doing flips, and they laughed and laughed, not realizing that the whole jungle of Jayne could probably hear them.
Unfortunately, one of the grown up monkeys did hear them laughing. He was a mean and nasty one too. He put his hands on his hips and yelled, “GET DOWN FROM THERE RIGHT NOW!”
Sigmund and George’s eyes opened really wide. Silently and slowly they got down. The mean old monkey told them that stealing bananas is a felony, and they would have to go to prison.
George gulped and said in a small voice, “Prison?”
“I didn’t know there was a monkey prison,” Sigmund commented.
The mean monkey harshly said, “Oh yes there is! It’s called The Pet Store. Come on you’re coming with me.” He took Sigmund and George to his car and said, “Get in!”
Silently they got in. George whispered to Sigmund, “I’ve heard bad things about this Pet Store place.”
Sigmund looked worried, “Isn’t it where humans can buy you and stuff?”
“Yea, they can take you to their house, and you’re there forever.”
Sigmund whined, “Oh no.”
They arrived at The Pet Store and were put in a room with a lot of other monkeys. One looked at Sigmund and said, “So, what are ya in for?”
Sigmund sighed and replied, “Banana stealing.”
“You too? Seems like everyone is in here for that!”
George put his finger over his mouth and said, “Shhh! Look over there.”
Two guys were talking. “How much for the monkeys?” one said.
“Just five cents a piece.”
“Five cents? That’s odd. Normally they are a couple of thousand. Oh well. I’ll take two hundred.”
“Alrighty then. Come on monkeys, you’re gonna have a new home.”
The man pushed all of the monkeys out of the room into a big blue Lincoln town car. Two hundred monkeys in this guy’s car, you’d think he’d go a little insane.
The man pointed at Sigmund and said, “You wanna drive?”
Sigmund thought to himself, ‘drive, what’s that?’ He didn’t know, so he just hopped up to the front seat and put his hands on a big circle thing. Not knowing what to do, he just kept turning it.
Finally arriving at the man’s house, he herded the monkeys into his room. The only thing the monkeys could think of to do was to screech, hurl themselves off the couch at high speeds and slam into the wall. At first the man found it quite amusing, but the spectacle lost its novelty halfway into it’s third hour. Two hours later, all the monkeys died. No apparent reason. They all just sort of dropped dead. Kind of like when you buy a goldfish at Meijer and it dies five hours later. Darn cheap monkeys.
The man didn’t know quite what to do. He had two hundred monkeys lying all over his room. It looked like he had two hundred throw rugs. He tried pretending they were just stuffed animals. That worked for a little while, that is until they began to decompose. It started to smell really bad.
He tried to slow down the decomposition by freezing them. Unfortunately there was only enough room in the freezer for two monkeys at a time, so he had to change them every thirty seconds. He also had to eat all the food in the freezer so it didn’t all go bad.
He tried burning them. Little did he know his bed was flammable. He had to extinguish the flame. Then he had two dead frozen monkeys, and one hundred and ninety eight dead charred monkeys in a pile on the bed.
He thought he could throw them away, but the garbage man told him that the city was not allowed to dispose of charred primates. He became agitated at his inability to dispose of the monkeys, so he severely beat one of the monkeys. He felt better.
Finally, he arrived at a solution. He gave them out as Christmas gifts. His friends pretended to like them, but he could tell they were lying.
And the moral is......(drum roll please.....) If you’re going to steal bananas, don’t get caught. You might end up being given out as a Christmas gift.