Not sure if this is the right community, but I didn’t see a general one. What search engine do you use? Besides Google increasingly spying on its users, the quality of its search results seems to have gotten significantly worse over the last decade. What search engine(s) do you use?
Let me know if you find one that uses AI to find groupings of my search terms in its catalogues instead of using AI to reduce my search to the nearest common searches made by others, over some arbitrary popularity threshold.
Theoretical search: “slip banana peel 1980s comedy movie”
Expected results in 2010: Pages about people slipping on banana peels, mostly in comedy movies, mostly from the 80s.
Expected results in 2024: More than I ever wanted to know about buying bananas online, the health impacts of eating too many or not enough bananas, and whatever “celebrities” have recently said something about them. Nothing about movies from the 80s.
The first result on Kagi search is this list which shows the movie years in parentheses so you can easily skip through just the ones from the 1980s. The other search results are more about the gag itself - first use of it by Charlie Chaplin, etc.
DDG results weren’t too bad, although repetitious and focused on the history of the gag, and not particular examples.
Per Brave:
To add, second result in Brave:
https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=slipping-on-a-banana-peel
Kagi:
Quick Answer
Based on the available information, the “slipping on a banana peel” gag has been a staple of comedy films since the early 20th century. The first known appearance of this gag on the big screen was in the Charlie Chaplin movie “By the Sea”, where Chaplin’s character “The Tramp” tosses a banana peel on the ground and then slips on it later. [1][2]
The banana peel gag was soon adopted by other silent film stars like Buster Keaton, who featured it in his 1928 film “The Cameraman”. [3] The gag continued to be used in comedy films throughout the 20th century, including in the 1926 Harold Lloyd film “For Heaven’s Sake”. [4]
However, the available information does not mention any specific 1980s comedy movies that featured the banana peel gag. The gag seems to have been more prevalent in the silent film era and earlier decades of the 20th century. [1][5]