A.T. Smith’s Picnic Fiasco “Slicing the Wasps” (1919)

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...

Laurel & Hardy’s Perfect Day (1929)

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...

Norman Z. McLeod’s It’s a Gift (1934)

McLeod’s It’s a Gift is a testament to W.C. Fields’s comic skill at making a picnic an utterly messy war zone. On their way west to California, the Bissonettes pronounced bis-on-nay and stopped for picnic lunch. Blithely ignoring a “Private...

Heath Robinson’s “Just a Picnic at Whipsnade” (1934)

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...

Lee Miller’s Picnic [Ile Sainte-Marguerite] (1937)

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. In the summer of 1937, Miller and Roland Penrose, her lover, lived in Mougins, a village above Cannes near...

W.C. Fields’s Three-Day Picnic (1938?)

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,...

Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece (1952)

“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...

Paul Bowles & James Schuyler’s A Picnic Cantata (1953)

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...

Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955)

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...

Jean Renoir’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959)

Renoir’s title of Le déjeuner sur l’herbe has mislead some to think it’s an allusion to Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe but it’s not so. Renoir’s satire aims for Brave New World, Huxley’s, a dystopian world in which science and industrial...