Remember the guy you always saw back in college riding a unicycle around campus or juggling devil sticks in the quad? The one who blasted shitty house music in his dorm room at all hours and would say total non-sequiturs in any discussion class you were unlucky enough to have with him? You know, that guy? Well, a variation on that guy named Christian Englander was arrested for throwing a banana peel at Dave Chappelle during a show in Santa Fe, New Mexico, earlier this week.
Englander, 30, a self-described “court jester” and “joker,” was interviewed by the Albuquerque Journal about the incident, and oh man. Photographed wearing colorful West African garb and a backwards baseball cap with a flower and joker playing card tucked in it, Englander insisted that his act of banana peel-throwing had no intended racial overtones. He contended that he “didn’t come from a racist family,” and would have thrown a full banana rather than a peel at Chappelle if he were “racially trying to imply that he was a monkey.” As for why he threw the banana peel in the first place, Englander said he was just engaging in the age-old tradition of heckling after Chappelle began teasing his “sensitive” artist friend Johnny Appleseed (is this a New Mexico thing?) for drawing pictures during the show.
Santa Fe mayor Javier Gonzales said he wants Englander prosecuted to the full extent of the law. So far, he seems to have learned his lesson: The Journal noted that when one of its reporters went to interview Englander at his home, there was a banana peel on the sidewalk and a bag of bananas hanging from the door. The Santa Fe New Mexican subsequently reported that Englander got in an altercation Wednesday with a fellow Santa Fe resident named Jay Wills, who is black, that ended with Englander throwing another goddamn banana peel that he happened to have in his pocket. Wills said he would be reporting the incident to police.