Jul

25

One leg shorter than the other.

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Watching Bringing Up Baby for the third or fourth time, I was caught off guard by a joke Katherine Hepburn tells when she breaks one heel about growing up on the side of a mountain.

Years ago, I saw a guy who had one leg shorter than the other. I don’t know what his actual story was, but one of the cleverer other children explained he must have grown up inbred on the side of a mountain. Ah, the youthful, crude understanding of genetics. See, the clever boy thought if a family lived on the side of a mountain, it might be helpful to have one leg shorter than the other, to aid in traversing the side of the mountain. Natural selection, and Bob’s your uncle. Only of course this doesn’t make a lick of sense. Even if evolution worked that fast, having one leg shorter than the other wouldn’t really be a desirable trait. Because not only do mountain dwellers have to go clockwise around the mountain, they also have to go up and down, and, more importantly, counterclockwise. But to my sugar-addled ten-year-old-first-learning-about-Darwin mind, this explanation made sense.

What surprised me is that this was a common enough misperception to have made it fodder for a mainstream movie gag. Any thoughts on why this might be? Given that, after only a cursory thought on the topic, it’s incoherence shines through?


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