Banana Challenge

About

The Banana Challenge, not to be confused with the Banana Sprite Challenge, is a dare game that involves either attempting to eat or chew and spit a banana while wearing pantyhose over one's head like a mask.

Origin

The challenge was introduced as a fun group activity for youth ministries and camps sometime in the late 1990s, with the earliest known description of the game posted on a community forum at YouthPastor.com^[4] on October 1st, 1998, under the name “banana blowout."

"Pick two unsuspecting teenagers (the younger, the better!).
Cut the legs off the hosiery. Use the two legs to place over the heads of the two contestants challenge them to chew up a banana in their mouths as gushy as possible. Then place the legs of the pantyhose completely over their heads. Hand them a cup and tell them that they have to push the banana from their mouths through the pantyhose into the cup they are holding.
Of course, none will go through. For fun, pull the top of the legs as they are pushing to smear it all over their faces. It is one of the funniest pranks we have ever played. We use it every year to initiate our newest members!"

Spread

On August 24th, 2006, YouTuber skrockstar^[1] uploaded a video of a man trying to strain chewed up banana through his pantyhose mask into a plastic cup. Between 2006 and 2013, dozens of video clips documenting similar attempts by teenagers were uploaded to YouTube. As of January 2014, a search query for "eating a banana through panty hose" on the site yields nearly 5,400 results. Despite its steadily growing presence on YouTube, the challenge went largely unnoticed until January 28th, 2014, when Buzzfeed^[2] featured a collection of YouTube videos in a post titled “Apparently People Have Been Trying To Eat Bananas Through Pantyhose On YouTube."

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References