Among the silly escapades in Big Top Pee-wee is Pee-Wee’s klutzy relationship with his financé Winnie Johnson. Every day, Pee-wee and Winnie meet for a lunchtime picnic, for which she makes egg salad sandwiches that Pee-wee hates.   Pee-wee endures this because it’s a chance to spoon. However, Winnie rebuffs every romance. She is insistent, and […] read more

McLeod’s It’s a Gift is a testament to W.C. Fields’s comic skill, making a picnic an utterly war zone. On their way west to California, the Bissonettes pronounced bis-on-nay and stopped for a picnic lunch. Blithely ignoring a “Private Property Keep Out” sign, Harold mistakes a private estate for a park. Speeding onto the lawn, […] read more

David Dodge and Alfred Hitchcock had differing views on the character of John Robie, aka The Cat, and the hero of To Catch a Thief. Dodge disguised the thirty-four-year-old to look older and plumper; for his film, Hitchcock chose fifty-one-year-old Cary Grant to play the role. Grant was neither thirty-four nor plump in 1955, but […] read more

Gibson, nature writer and artist of the 1890s, describes the nature of things in “Honey Dew Picnic” from My Studio Neighbors (1897) is, a humorous essay about the feeding frenzy of insects in a forest. He says that while he never actually witnessed the honey-dew picnic, he has found ample evidence that it was so. […] read more

Miller’s Picnic (1937) is a photograph lovers’s gossip. At the time, Miller seemed to think of it as just another snapshot, but it’s now among her best sellers. A less well-known photograph of the picnic by Roland Penrose, showing  Miller bare-chested, is less well-known. In the summer of 1937, Miller and Roland Penrose, her lover, […] read more

A joke is also at Norman Lindsay’s The Picnic Gods  (1907) is a joke. Usually, Lindsay revels in titillation,  naked buxom women, and muscular men. He took as his mission to rid Australia of its prudish sensibilities, and the content of his paintings and etchings characteristically exhibits his disdain for correct social standards and his […] read more

Goldman’s The Princess Bride takes a satiric jab at a traditional lovers’s picnic. “Indeed,” he writes in the novel, Vizzini, “had set out a little picnic spread. From the knapsack that he always carried, he had taken a small handkerchief, and on it, he has placed two wine goblets. In the center was a small […] read more

Woolf’s picnic on the summit of Monte Rosa, a fictional place in South America, is the high point (pun intended) of The Voyage Out (1915). Journeying on donkeys walking in a single file, the narrator creates the image of “a jointed caterpillar, tufted with the white parasols of the ladies, and the Panama hats of […] read more

Trillin’s “Fly Frills to Miami” makes a picnic in an airplane “normal.” When Trillin’s wife Alice complains about travel expenses, Calvin decides to go cheap by purchasing food from New York to Miami. Based on “Alice’s Law of Compensatory Cashflow,” the result is a comic riff on gluttony.* Not content with a measly sandwich, this […] read more

“Heroic Survivors of the Picnic.” is Gwen Raverat’s bittersweet memory of a miserable picnic. It’s the next-to-last anecdote in her memoir Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood. I think she means to suggest that life was no picnic but that she has no remorse. Despite the cold wind, rain, nettles, ants, and many other miseries, including […] read more

The humor of Smith’s picnic fiasco “Slicing the Wasps” is obvious. The legend reads: “Suitable for both sexes, young and old. Fascinating, amusing, skillful exciting, and with that element of danger.” It’s also an allusion to John Leech’s Punch cartoon “The Awful Appearance of Wasps” posted elsewhere on PicnicWit. Featured Image: A.T. Smith. “A New […] read more

According to Jerrold’s satire “Picnic Reform,” British “Picnic- frequenters” must radically alter their “picnic gastronomy.” Change is accomplished by eliminating the ordinary. “Could anything be more barbarous?” he asks “than the common picnic fare of England?” Could anything be worse eating alfresco than “substantial viands, ham, and beef,’ those greasy plummets called meat patties, a […] read more

“Le Pique-nique,” a piano composition about 30 seconds long, is one of twenty-one very short musical interpretations in Sports et Divertissement [Sports & Entertainments] devoted to the happiness of people at play. Satie’s preface ­explains that two artistic elements of Sports et Divertissement, his music, and Charles Martin’s drawings, form an album, a whole, that […] read more

When Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, and his wife Lucrezia Borgia asked for a painting expressing worldly delights, drinking, and sensuality, Giovanni Bellini could not refuse the offer, though he was eighty-five and in failing health. The Feast of the Gods [Il festino degli dei] is an illustration of one of Ovid’s many Priapic […] read more

Miró probably printed this image of rustics at play on a typical picnic cloth of red gingham as a decorative joke. Miró has said it’s never easy for him to talk about his art. In a letter to Pierre Matisse, however, he explains that he is drawn to his objects by some “magnetic force” that […] read more

Jean Renoir’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and Édouard  Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe share the same title, nothing more. Importantly, Renoir’s picnics, there are two of them, are comic jabs at Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, which does not have a picnic. According to Huxley, scientific rationalism defeats human passion, but Renoir rejects rationalism. Renoir […] read more

Family Happiness is Laurie Colwin’s comic tale about an Eastside Manhattan Jewish housewife, finds who finds happiness at home and on a picnic in bed with her lover. On the way to her first affair, Polly Demarest stops for a smoked salmon sandwich. Alone and excited, they kiss; he asks for the salmon and then […] read more

The zany humor of “Just a Picnic at Whipsnade” is Heath Robinson’s trademark. Of the two picnics here, the lion has got the better deal. It also helps to know that Whipsnade is England’s biggest zoo, near Luton, an hour and twenty minutes north of London. Featured Image: “Just a Picnic at Whipsnade.” See Heath […] read more

The London Stock Exchange’s reaction to a current financial panic is the butt of John Leech’s “The Currency Question, or The Exchange Out for a Day.” Leech implies picnicking in troubled times is laughable when buying and selling stocks is as much a gamble as horse racing. The cartoon’s legend is an exchange between Jones […] read more

Brunhoff ‘s Babar Visits Another Planet (1972) begins at the start of ­­yet another family picnic until a rocketship upsets the fun. Before they realize the situation, Babar, Celeste, their children Pom, Flora, Arthur, cousin Alexander, and Zephir, the monkey, are sucked into the rocket and taken to a distant planet. It ends well, and […] read more

Bowles and Schuyler’s performance piece A Picnic Cantata: for Four Women’s Voices, Two Pianos, and Percussion (1954) is delightfully silly. It’s about a happy picnic that is intentionally nonsensical. The music by Bowles’ and the libretto by Schuyler capture the superficiality and simplicity of picnics without deep meaning. If there is a plot, it concerns […] read more

Bridgland’s Forward, Conquer! We Have a Car and Can Picnic in the Country! Is part fun and part satire. Yet, whether Bridgland knows it or not,  no other mode of transportation has boosted picnicking and helped make them ubiquitous. See Adam Bridgland. Forward, Conquer! We Have a Car and Can Picnic in the Country! (2006), […] read more

Worrall’s “Taking and Being Taken” depicts a buffalo unsetting a photographer’s picnic. It’s a topsy-turvy moment in which the Buffalo, then being exterminated on the American Great Plains, gets even (momentarily) by disrupting a hapless photographer. Worrall’s satire is roughly contemporary with Kansan Brewster Higely, who wrote the pastoral poem “Oh, Give me a Home […] read more

Talbott’s Apple Pie Picnic is a send-up of the cliché “As American as apple pie.” Talbott jams as many icons as he can on the picnic cloth. Marilyn Monroe is on her knees next to a picnic basket, a steaming apple pie, a  copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and the familiar image of James […] read more

Talbott’s satire Cheesecake Picnic Party: A Killer Batch of Tasty Treats (2007) evokes the Hollywood film noir. It’s a satire of the so-called cheesecake images of sexy women. Featured Image: David Russell Talbott. Cheesecake Picnic Party: A Killer Batch of Tasty Treats (2007). Oil on Canvas. Private Collection read more

Among Lee’s vivid memories is a picnic by the sea, a grand event sponsored by the Slad church choir. It was a trek of fifty-one miles to Weston-Super-Mare that most of the townsfolk stuffed themselves into hired five charabancs [SHarəˌbaNG, -ˌbaNGk]. Lined up, the five omnibuses must have looked like some giant caterpillar chugging through […] read more

Help! It is Richard Lester’s romp with The Beatles. Among the many scenes is a brief picnic in the snow that sets up singing “Ticket to Ride.” The song and the picnic are completely disconnected. And there’s no picnic basket when the quartet sits at a red and white gingham cloth set with plates, flatware, […] read more

Williams’s Popular Song Hampstead Is the Place to Ruralise Hampstead Is the Place to Ruralise, All on a Summer Day (1861) is a comic hymn dedicated to the pleasures of Hampstead Heath. The euphemism “ruralizing,” like gypsying, had been in use since the the1820s but faded by the end of the Nineteenth Century. Williams’ song was […] read more

Picnic is the euphemism for a day-long eating orgy in Margaret Gordon’s Wilberforce Goes on a Picnic (1982). It’s the story of obese bears and a goat, who collectively devour mounds of hamburgers on rolls, sandwiches, a jar of catsup, a bowl heaped with mashed potatoes, bananas, peaches, plums, a pie, a cake, tarts, and […] read more

Perhaps it’s gossip, but according to Robert Lewis Taylor, Fields crammed his Lincoln or Cadillac, he was a collector, with hampers of watercress, chopped olives and nuts, tongue, peanut butter, and strawberry preserves, deviled eggs, and spiced ham sandwiches, celery stuffed with Roquefort cheese, black caviar, pâté de foie gras, anchovies; smoked oysters, baby shrimps, […] read more

Chaplin’s A Day’s Pleasure called Charlie’s Picnic is an excursion in San Pedro harbor. It’s not a picnic, and Chaplin preferred A Day’s Pleasure as an ironic title because the story is a series of ironic misfortunes: seasickness, fistfights, and a return home that ends with a fight with traffic police in a drying pile […] read more

Fellini’s scampagnata, picnic, in Amarcord, a semi-autobiographical narrative, tells about an ordinary alfresco lunch set in the shade of the yard of a farmhouse. What is served is unknown, but there are bottles of raffia-bound Chianti, a bowl of hard-boiling eggs, and bread. Thinking that Uncle Theo deserves a day out from the psychiatric hospital […] read more

Laurel and Hardy’s A Perfect Day is a picnic screw-up. The day begins with smiles, but nothing goes right, and they never get far from home. The picnic is an unfulfilled dream. *Compare this with Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick A Day’s Pleasure posted elsewhere on PicnicWit.com. Also, Picnicsonfilm.org. Featured Image:  The picnic is willing; the tire […] read more

Trollope’s beach picnic in Can You Forgive Her (1864) is highlighted with a stern warning: “Yarmouth is not a happy place for a picnic. A picnic should be held among green things. Green turf is absolutely essential. There should be, if possible, rocks, old timber, moss and bramble. There should certainly be hills and dales –on […] read more

Stettheimer liked whimsy and humor in her paintings but included jokes only her friends would recognize. Her outlook is surreal. She preferred the outdoors, like Picnic in Bedford Hills, because interiors are less joyful than an outdoor scene. Like Matisse’s The Red Studio (1911), Stettheimer’s perspective for Picnic is flat, and the coloration is slightly […] read more

When Charles Dickens visited the Looking Glass Prairie in 1842, it reminded him of a  Catlin exhibition in London. “The sun was going down, very red and bright,” Dickens writes, “and the prospect looked like that ruddy sketch of Catlin’s, which attracted our attention (you remember?) except that there was not so much ground as […] read more

Dickens does not use the word picnic. But when the Wardles have lunch in their barouche, it’s an unmistakably a picnic: “In an open barouche, the horses of which had been taken out, the better to accommodate it to the crowded place, stood a stout old gentleman, in a blue coat and bright buttons, corduroy […] read more

Seymour’s picnics sketches show a keen awareness of their potential for humor and satire. Especially if they’ve gone wrong. Unpacking for a Pic-Nic, for example, pokes fun at what breaks in a basket, as the legend makes amply clear, “Oh! Dear, here’s the sherry and mix’d pickles broke!” O, yes, and they have broke into […] read more

Seymour’s picnics are comic as in Unpacking for a Pic-Nic  and “—A merry holiday party, forming a tolerable boat-load, and well provided with baskets of provisions, were rowing along the beautiful and picturesque banks that fringe the river’s side near Twickenham, eagerly looking out for a spot where they might enjoy their “pic-nic” to perfection.”  […] read more

Gilbert and Sullivan’s Thespis or the Gods Grown Old is an early collaboration and not one of their best. It’s a topsy-turvy derivative version of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta Orpheus in the Underworld or Orphée aux envers. Instead of comedy in the Underworld, there is comedy on Mount Olympus as a troupe of silly actors walk […] read more

Merienda first appears in the anonymous picaresque novel The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes in 1554, * ninety-five years before the French word pique-nique in 1649. It is used to denote a snack. But when Francesco de Quevedo uses merienda in El Buscon (The Swindler), it is a luncheon in the park at which hot […] read more

“A Jaunt to the Looking-Glass Prairie and Back” left Dickens with mixed feelings. The weather was hot and the journey tedious, but the picnic on Looking-Glass Prairie” was something Dickens wanted, mostly because he had been told that any sightseer should not miss its grandeur.  The expedition set out from St. Louis, Missouri, where they […] read more

Being Anglophile and aware of London happenings, Irving probably picked up the aftermath of the Pic Nic Society scandal during his tour of Europe 1804-1806. The word stuck, but it’s used only once as an adjective to mean something silly. Under the heading “Fashions by Anthony Evergreen,” (1807) for the journal Salmagundi; or, The Whim-whams […] read more