One hot summer's day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch."Just the thing to quench my thirst," quoth he.Drawing back a few paces,he took a run and a jump,and just missed the bunch.Turning round again with a One,Two,Three,he jumped up,but with no greater success.Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel,but at last had to give it up,and walked away with his nose in the air,saying:"I am sure they are sour."
It is easy to despise what you cannot get
It is one of a number of fables which feature only a single animal protagonist.(Other examples include The Cock and the Jewel.)
Frank Tashlin adapted the tale into a 1941 Color Rhapsodies short for Screen Gems/Columbia Pictures.The Fox and the Grapes marked the first appearance of Screen Gems' most popular characters,The Fox and the Crow.The Electric Company adapted the fable as one of the "Very Short Book" series; in only a few pages and words it sums up the fable exactly as written,with the fox saying "I'll bet they're sour!" The Librivox recording of this fable is included as example content with some releases of the operating system Ubuntu.
The fable illustrates the concept of cognitive dissonance,which occurs when a person tries to hold incompatible ideas simultaneously.Dissonance is reduced by altering one of the belief or desire states,even if it leads to irrational behavior.[1]
A modern variant on the tale is the following joke from the comedian Mitch Hedberg:"Sometimes in the middle of the night,I think of something that's funny,then I go get a pen and I write it down.Or if the pen's too far away,I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny."
One hot summer's day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch."Just the thing to quench my thirst," quoth he.Drawing back a few paces,he took a run and a jump,and just missed the bunch.Turning round again with a One,Two,Three,he jumped up,but with no greater success.Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel,but at last had to give it up,and walked away with his nose in the air,saying:"I am sure they are sour."
It is easy to despise what you cannot get
It is one of a number of fables which feature only a single animal protagonist.(Other examples include The Cock and the Jewel.)
Frank Tashlin adapted the tale into a 1941 Color Rhapsodies short for Screen Gems/Columbia Pictures.The Fox and the Grapes marked the first appearance of Screen Gems' most popular characters,The Fox and the Crow.The Electric Company adapted the fable as one of the "Very Short Book" series; in only a few pages and words it sums up the fable exactly as written,with the fox saying "I'll bet they're sour!" The Librivox recording of this fable is included as example content with some releases of the operating system Ubuntu.
The fable illustrates the concept of cognitive dissonance,which occurs when a person tries to hold incompatible ideas simultaneously.Dissonance is reduced by altering one of the belief or desire states,even if it leads to irrational behavior.[1]
A modern variant on the tale is the following joke from the comedian Mitch Hedberg:"Sometimes in the middle of the night,I think of something that's funny,then I go get a pen and I write it down.Or if the pen's too far away,I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny."