A top banana is the person at the head of things, the one in charge or the one who matters most. It was first used of the star comedian in a stage show, the performer whose name topped the bill and who got the best lines and the biggest laughs, but it soon spread to mean the boss or leader in any setting, from a company to a government department. Anyone ranked just below is sometimes called the “second banana”, a supporting figure who feeds lines to the star and gets the smaller laughs.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘top banana’?
The phrase comes out of American burlesque, where comedians were graded by billing much as boxers or wrestlers might be. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for “top banana” is from 1948, though some researchers have since found an earlier example from 1947. That 1947 source is an article by Charles D. Rice about the comedian Phil Silvers, published on 28 December that year. “Top Banana” appears there only as the headline: the text of the article itself talks about the “first banana”, contrasted with a “second” and “third banana”, rather than using “top banana” directly.
In that same article, Silvers claimed that the burlesque comic Harry Steppe had coined the phrase back in 1927 as a term for the leading comedian on a bill. That story rests entirely on Silvers’s own recollection rather than any independent record from the 1920s, so it should be treated as a claim rather than a settled fact. A rival account instead points to the comedian Frank Lebowitz, who reportedly used real bananas as props in his act, as the possible inspiration for the whole family of “banana” ranking terms.
Whatever the truth of either story, the wider slang system was clearly in use before “top banana” itself turns up in print: a 1938 newspaper article about burlesque terminology already uses “third banana”, showing that comedians were being sorted into a banana hierarchy roughly a decade before the top of that ladder was recorded in writing. From there the phrase moved out of the theatre and into general use for whoever holds the senior position in any group.