Exploding cigar
The most famous case concerning the intentionally deadly variety was an alleged plot by the CIA in the 1960s to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
[3][4] The largest New York–based manufacturer of exploding cigars was Richard Appel, a German refugee from Nuremberg, who in or about 1940 opened a gag novelty factory on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
[3] According to Adams, the large-scale switch to a non-chemical device occurred in approximately 1915 in the aftermath of a death caused by a homemade exploding cigar rigged with dynamite.
[3] Though exploding cigars were not normally rigged with dynamite but with explosive caps using a less powerful incendiary,[6] following the incident, a number of US states banned the product altogether.
[9][10] Both prank and intentionally deadly exploding cigars have been featured in numerous works of fiction, spanning many forms of media including literature, film, comics books, cartoons and others.
[14] Film examples include Cecil B. DeMille's 1921 romance Fool's Paradise, wherein the main character is blinded by an exploding cigar;[15] Laurel and Hardy's Great Guns (1941), which features a gag in which tobacco is replaced by gunpowder;[16] in Road To Morocco (1942) with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope features the duo mixing gunpowder with tobacco in order to create chaos and escape a desert sheik with their girls; the Elke Sommer vehicle, Deadlier Than the Male (1967), where a murder by exploding cigar is a key plot element;[17] in The Beatles' 1968 animated feature film, Yellow Submarine, where an exploding cigar is used to rebuff a psychedelic boxing monster;[18] the 1984 comedy Top Secret!, in which Omar Sharif's British secret agent character is pranked with an exploding cigar by a blindman;[19] and in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, where the main antagonist's cigar is swapped with an exploding one during a comedy skit.
[23] Other media examples include television appearances such as when Peter Falk's Columbo must solve an industrial magnate's death by exploding cigar in the episode "Short Fuse" (1972),[24] in a season four episode of the United States television, CBS crime drama, CSI: NY titled "Child's Play", wherein the forensic team investigate the death of a man killed by an exploding cigar,[25] and in a 1966 episode of The Avengers entitled "A Touch of Brimstone";[26] in video games such as Day of the Tentacle where Hoagie can offer George Washington an exploding cigar;[27] and as a stock device by the Joker in Batman comic books.
According to a 1932 Associated Press story, U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant gave Horace Norton, the founder of a now defunct college in Chicago, an exploding cigar soon after being introduced to him, but the "joke" wasn't revealed until many years later.
Years later, when the school was shutting its doors for good, the alumni thought it would be a fitting gesture to smoke the cigar at the college's annual reunion.
[29] A 1952 news report contradicts one detail, holding that the explosion ultimately occurred at a family reunion rather than the alumni affair noted.
[31][footnote 3] Reportedly, Ernest Hemingway, urged on by a group of journalists with whom he was drinking at the Palace Hotel bar in Rapallo, Italy, presented an exploding cigar to one of four bodyguards of Turkish general İsmet İnönü.
[32] In the late 1950s under Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidential administration and in the early 1960s under John F. Kennedy's, the CIA had been brainstorming and implementing plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, going as far as enlisting the help of American Mafia leaders such as Johnny Roselli and Santo Trafficante, Jr. to assist in carrying out their plans.
[34][footnote 2] Whether true or not, the CIA's exploding cigar assassination plot inspired the cover of the October 1963 issue (#82) of Mad Magazine.
Conceived by Al Jaffee, the cover (pictured at right) bears the headline, "You'll Get a BANG out of this issue of Mad Magazine", and features a painting by Norman Mingo depicting Castro in the act of lighting a cigar wrapped with a cigar band on which is drawn Alfred E. Neuman with his fingers plugging his ears, awaiting the explosion.
