Chimps' Tea Party at London Zoo (1927)
The chimpanzees' tea party was a hugely popular form of public entertainment in which our simian cousins were provided with a table of food and drink.
The first such party held at London Zoo was in 1926 and was then put on almost daily during the summer months until its discontinuation in 1972, thanks to changing attitudes and a diminishing supply of young chimps being caught in the wild [1].
Initially, an amusing set piece was anticipated in which the juvenile chimps - sometimes dressed in clothes for the occasion - would cause (controlled) chaos by throwing things around, jumping on the furniture, fighting over the last slice of cake, etc. Being subhuman, the expectation was that they'd commit acts unacceptable in polite society.
However, things did not go as planned; being intelligent tool-users, the chimps quickly mastered the art of serving tea and instead of amusing those watching with their antics, they would quietly sit at the table enjoying a cuppa - essentially making a monkey out of us and our expectations.
As Martha Gill writes:
"The chimps had done something unnerving in those early days. Their
display of competence challenged not only the egos of their audience but
the very premise of the zoo itself. If animals were capable of sense or
even sensibility, this collection of cages and cells might start to
look a little sinister. Less like innocent entertainment, perhaps, and
more like a sadistic sort of prison." [2]
And so, it was decided to train the well-mannered chimps into behaving badly; drinking from the spout of the teapot, playing with their food, etc. In other words, their comic routine was scripted by their keepers and not a spontaneous display of animal tomfoolery.
This enabled (and encouraged) human visitors to the zoo to go on believing in their own social superiority and higher intelligence; to think of other apes as essentially a grotesque parody of Man rather than sentient, sensitive beings in their own right (and certainly not creatures made in God's image) [3].
Notes
[1] Although the first chimps' tea party held at London Zoo was in 1926, the origins of such probably
date back to the mid-nineteenth century (chimps were first exhibited at London Zoo in 1883). It's certainly true to say that primates have long had a role to play in popular forms of entertainment, such as travelling carnivals and fairs.
See John S. Allen, Julie Park, and Sharon L. Watt, 'The Chimpanzee Tea Party: Anthropomorphism, Orientalism, and Colonialism', in Visual Anthropology Review, Volume 10, Number 2 (Fall 1994), pp. 45-54: click here to read online or download as a pdf.
Readers who are interested can click here to watch a tea party at London Zoo filmed in 1955. During the post-War years, London Zoo effectively became a training (and distribution) centre for tea party chimps, who were sent off all over the world.
[2] Martha Gill, 'Zoos are the opposite of educational: they construct fictions about their captives', The Guardian (22 Oct 2023): click here.
[3] This, despite the fact that in terms of comparative anatomy,
behaviour, and biochemistry, chimpanzees, for example, are remarkably
similar to human beings, sharing a common evolutionary history and over 98% DNA with us.
Allen, Park, and Watt argue that adult white Westerners can be particularly smug; their anthropomorphic conceit containing as it does an element of racism, seeing the chimp as they do as an essentially uncivilised creature - childlike and primitive - i.e., much as they once commonly viewed indigenous peoples. See 'The Chimpanzee Tea Party: Anthropomorphism, Orientalism, and Colonialism' ... op. cit.
Bonus video: a scene from Carry On Regardless (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1961), featuring Kenneth Williams and friends having tea: click here.
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