One of my favorite movies is “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.” It’s a weird movie, and funny. There’s a line in there in which John Lithgow’s character, Dr Lizardo (AKA John Whorfin, the evil Lectroid from Planet 10), says “Laugh while you can, monkey boy.” And the term “monkey boy” arises at other points in the movie, too.
I was hanging out with some rather hyperactive and English-deficient 5th grade boys during a recess period, recently, and started aping some of the Lithgow lines from the movie, using Dr Lizardo’s over-the-top fake Italian accent. The concept of “monkey boy” was something these boys were able to wrap their minds around, and so it became a bit of an out-of-control meme. I added the prefix “crazy” to it, and in that form it became a form of address, as in, “what are you doing, crazy monkey boy?”
The boys love it. And now, anytime they see me, they say, in good English (if somewhat Italianesque-sounding, a la Dr Lizardo), “I’m a crazy monkey boy!” I think the other English teachers are annoyed with this. But my thinking is: at least one of these boys may never have uttered a coherent sentence in English before this meme took off, and in that sense, I’ve taught some English.
It’s funny to imagine this will be something they always remember. I can imagine a scenario in which one of these boys, someday grown up and in his 20’s or something, is in some setting where he meets a foreigner, and decides to say the only thing he knows in English: “Laugh while you can, monkey boy!”
Here are two pictures of some of these boys, monkeying around in the hall (I’m pretty sure they’re miming some kind of pregnancy and birth scenario – note that the one has his head up under the shirt of the other!):
