Have you noticed how funny penguins are? If you are watching a movie, or reading a book, and a penguin suddenly shows up, we all laugh for some reason. I am guessing this is because there is no situation anyone can conceive in which a penguin showing up would not seem odd or out of place, outside of a zoo or an expedition to the south pole perhaps. And so penguins have been relegated to cheap humor. Like a pie in the face, a penguin can be thrown out with such reckless abandon in hopes of getting a cheap laugh from the audience.
Here is a more important question: who trains them? Most animals we see in movies are trained professional animals. Thus the tiger we see on film looks exactly how we expect a tiger to look and acts like we expect it to act. It does not, under any circumstance, lie around like a redneck husband on a sofa, although such behavior is probably closer to actual tiger behavior. It follows that when they get a penguin for a movie it is a professional penguin actor, or at least a stunt penguin pretending to be a respectable Shakespearian actor, and thus has been trained by someone. Is this what happens to falconers gone bad? If they do poorly on their FAT (Falconry Aptitude Test) are they relegated to schools that only train flightless birds like penguins and ostriches (which I think the plural of should be “ostrichii” but that is another commentary altogether)? Or do these individuals strive to someday train penguins to be actors? Perhaps they take college courses like “Voice training for flightless aquatic birds.” These trainers most likely occupy one of the lowest levels of social strata. Imagine a man in a bar hitting on a woman saying that for a living he “tames and trains wild penguins to be famous movie penguins.” This statement is on par with “I play the big purple dinosaur,” though perhaps not so bad as “I play WITH the big purple dinosaur.”
Returning to my original premise of penguins being funny, imagine a penguin with a bow tie on. Not an altogether original image, one we have all seen a million times. And yet nobody wonders how they get this tie on. They don’t have fingers so they certainly can’t do it themselves. Once again we return to the penguin trainers. These men, and women, selflessly give of their time, and their self respect, to not only train, but dress, feed and most likely apply the makeup to our dashing Hollywood penguins. These unsung heroes of the penguin world, or as it is affectionately known Sphenisciformes-Land, are unknown to us Spheniscophiles while their protégés are remembered in the hallowed halls of our minds and forever captured on celluloid.