Word.ws English Dictionary

second banana

second banana noun: a comedian who plays a secondary or supporting role, especially as straight man and traditionally in vaudeville or burlesque theatre.

Noun

second banana (plural second bananas)

  1. (colloquial, idiomatic) A comedian who plays a secondary or supporting role, especially as straight man and traditionally in vaudeville or burlesque theatre.
    • He grew disenchanted with playing second banana and never getting credit for the laughter.
  2. (colloquial, idiomatic) A person who serves in a supporting, secondary, or subsidiary capacity; an assistant.
    • The plumber left his second banana behind, to finish installing my new sink.
    • When you want to be the boss, but you can't, it's not a lot of fun to be second banana.2012 August 30, Michael Smyth, “The lifeboat is filling up”, in The Province

Forms of second banana

pluralsecond bananas

Questions about second banana

What does second banana mean?
Second banana means a comedian who plays a secondary or supporting role, especially as straight man and traditionally in vaudeville or burlesque theatre.
What part of speech is second banana?
Second banana is a noun.
What is the plural of second banana?
The plural of second banana is second bananas.

Words near second banana in the dictionary

  1. Second Amendment
  2. Second Amendment sanctuaries
  3. Second Amendment sanctuary
  4. second aunt
  5. second aunts
  6. second banana
  7. second bananas
  8. second base
  9. second baseman
  10. second basemen
  11. second bases

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: second banana (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-second banana.ogg.

Cite this entry: “second banana.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/second_banana. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.