Meta example: I always thought that throwing Curious George (essentially a small child) in jail for accidentally calling the fire department was ridiculous Disproportionate Retribution. Learning that the Reys wrote the book shortly after coming to America (escaping from Paris just before the Nazis came nonetheless!) made me realize that the scene probably reflects a common immigrant fear: that you will accidentally break a law you didn't know existed and be punished harshly.
There's a lot of debate over whether George is actually a "monkey" or a chimpanzee. However, those debates are moot if one considers the possibility that George is a Barbary macaque—a tailless monkey that does, in fact, live in Africa.
Then again, Barbary macaques are found only in northern Africa (as well as southern Spain) and not the African jungle where George is clearly from. Chimpanzees are found in that geographic area and George does resemble a chimpanzee. As for why he's called a "monkey", well it's not that unusual. Many "monkeys" in films, television and literature are actually chimpanzees. Some people just don't know the difference. In fact, some people will call pretty much any kind of non-human primate a monkey. (Even King Kong has been called a monkey before, even though he is clearly an ape.)
Wiseman seemed to be holding the Idiot Ball in "Toot, Toot, Tootsie Goodbye" when she takes a while to realise the obvious crossword clue: "A three-letter word for feline", but then you realise that that scene takes place in George's dream.
The Man in the Yellow Hat has consistently been shown to be a scientist whenever the plot addresses his job (though what kind of scientist he is varies from episode to episode). It makes perfect sense that he would be a scientist; what other profession would someone qualified to care for a monkey have?
George is a baby chimpanzee that the Man in the Yellow Hat appears to be raising as a human child. That's fine as far as that goes, but eventually George is going to grow up and hit puberty. Baby chimps are cute and all, but an adult chimp is phenomenally strong and can be very aggressive, as several people in real life have discovered. How long is it going to be before the police find the Man in the Yellow Hat beaten to death with his own arm?
Is it actually said that George is a baby chimpanzee?
What if he isn't a chimp, but a Barbary "ape"? Even so, as an adult George will be hard to handle.
Is George ever explicitly stated not to be an adult?
At the end of Curious George Flies a Kite, Bill gives one of his baby bunnies to George as a pet and the last page shows George feeding his new baby bunny a carrot. Since the baby bunny is not seen again in the original books, this means one of two things: either George couldn't ultimately keep the bunny or perhaps it died in the interim, likely due to George's irresponsibility!
In one episode, the Man with the Yellow Hat has a cold or the flu or something. When George hears that his neighbour's cat was lethargic during her pregnancy, he remembers that the man is lethargic too, and concludes that he is going to have kittens. While this is obviously not true, if it were true, then the kittens would have to either be Chest Bursters, be vomited up, or come out through the man's urethra or his butt. Highly unpleasant whatever would have happened.
Considering that this never could have happened anyway, why bother speculating?
They don't. George can understand the humans, but the rest of what he does is basically an elaborate series of pantomime. And some are better than others at understanding, depending on how long they've known George.
