A specific type of
Street Performer, the Organ Grinder is a
Street Musician who would make a living turning the crank on a self-performing organ (sometimes mistakenly called a hurdy-gurdy), usually with a trained monkey on a leash dancing around—alternatively, the monkey is the one turning the organ, and the human is just there to hold the leash.
More or less a
Dead Horse Trope these days, but expect them to pop up in stories set in the 19th and early 20th century. (They've actually been banned in quite a few cities, both because of complaints about the excessive noise they make and because of copyright violations by some of the musicians.)
See also
One Man Band.
Not related to putting someone's privates in a meatgrinder.
Examples:
Film
Video Games
- In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Link learns the Song of Storms from such a guy.
- The organ grinder is one of the most nefarious enemies in the old text-adventure game Beyond Zork.
Western Animation
- Looney Tunes: Bugs Bunny pretended to be the monkey working with an organ grinder in one of his cartoons, after he caught the real monkey pocketing the profits.
- An organ grinder occasionally shows up in Cow and Chicken, though the monkey has since decomposed into a skeleton and the machine is literally grinding organs into powder. (It's uncertain as to whether the machine is grinding the musical instrument or body parts.)
- Monkey from Dexters Laboratory had an enemy who was a hypnotic organ grinder.
- In Hey Arnold! Helga gets bit by an organ grinder's monkey.
- An organ grinder appears in the "Rhapsody In Blue" segment of Fantasia/2000.
- In the Droopy cartoon Dixieland Droopy, Droop practices being a jazz band conductor to a record, but after he's kicked out of his home, he looks for other places to play the record, and one of them is an organ grinder's organ.
