Gorilla suits

Gorilla Suits are full-bodied costumes loosely resembling gorillas or other large primates. Gorillas have long fascinated audiences, as a source of both awe and horror (as with King Kong) but also humor. The traditional gorilla suit embodies both, and as such has become a popular Halloween or masquerade party costume. It has also seen extensive use in film, television, and comics, sometimes to symbolize a "real" gorilla but quite often for a gag in which a character wears a gorilla suit, and at some point, becomes entangled with the real thing (typically, played by another actor in a suit).

The early history of the art of gorilla impersonation is foggy, but seems to date at least to the late 1920s, with the rise of Charles Gemora, an early practitioner of the art in such short films as Circus Lady and the Our Gang entry Bear Shooters. In later decades, in addition to abounding in B movies, the gorilla suit came to prominence in television, in a wide range of series from 1960s sitcoms like The Addams Family and The Beverly Hillbillies, which typically attempted to present their gorillas as "real," to more recent series such as L.A. Law and Scrubs, which have contrived to have regular characters don the primate costume.

In addition to the movies and Halloween, gorilla suits are recognized through National Gorilla Suit Day, which falls on January 31st every year. The holiday was concocted by MAD cartoonist Don Martin in a 1964 paperback Don Martin Bounces Back!. The most notable story in the tome revolves around a hapless fellow named Fenster, who dares to mock the concept of National Gorilla Suit Day and is thus repeatedly pummeled by men in gorilla suits.

Gorilla suit performance involves pantomime, wearing a heavy costume, broad physical comedy skills, and a suspension of disbelief, while playing on that very artifice. In this respect, gorilla suits are not far removed from puppetry. Perhaps recognising this fact, Jim Henson utilized typical gorilla suits, and never a full-bodied gorilla Muppet, in several productions, as a comic throw-away gag. In all such cases, the person inside the gorilla suit is uncredited, and research has yet to identify the performers.

In recent decades, the work of performers/designers such as Rick Baker have altered the mechanics and effect of gorilla suits, often utilizing animatronics, taxidermy eyes, realistic fur, and other aides to prevent a more realistic mimicking of genuine apes. Jim Henson's Creature Shop has contributed to this development in its own way, through work on Buddy and George of the Jungle, and many suit performers of Henson creatures have also portrayed gorillas in other productions. However, the Jim Henson Pictures feature film MirrorMask returned the gorilla suit to its roots, with circus performers donning the costume, and accessorizing it with a tutu.