From Benjamin Dreyer on Facebook yesterday:
It’s once again been brought to my attention that many people seem not to grasp that Ice Capades is a play on words and that they are not in fact capades on ice.
(I myself learned this at a rather advanced age, but: earlier than today.)
Well, Ice Capades originated as a play on words, but that doesn’t mean it still is (only) a play on words. History is not destiny. BD tells us, in fact, that many people — I would say almost all of us — don’t appreciate that it originated as a play on words. Which is to say that for all these people it is not a play on words, but an odd compound of ice and capades. Just as, for almost everyone these days, the name of SRI International (a Silicon Valley R&D nonprofit institute) is just a string of letter names, not an abbreviation for anything, despite the fact that the organization began its life as the Stanford Research Institute (I know this, but I’m a very old man, 6 years older than the Stanford Research Institute); SRI is now an orphan initialism.
So now, a lot of facts.
Big skating entertainment shows. The story begins with the Ice Follies, founded in 1936, and continues with the Ice Capades, founded in 1940 — note the spelling as a compound word, Ice + Capades (on the model of Ice Follies), rather than as Icecapades, a spelling that would have made the pun (somewhat) clearer in print. (In speech, /ajskǝpedz/ is more clearly a pun on /ɛskǝpedz/, differing only in the initial vowel — see the boldfacing.)
From Wikipedia:
Ice Capades was founded in February 1940 in Hershey, Pennsylvania, by nine men who called themselves the Arena Managers Association. They met to discuss forming an ice show to play in their arenas during the 1940–1941 entertainment season. The arenas represented were all well-known venues of the day [including the Hershey Sports Arena]
The next bit isn’t essential to the story, but it’s personally significant for me. Again from Wikipedia:
Hersheypark Arena is a multi-purpose indoor arena located in Hershey, Pennsylvania, United States, managed by Hershey Entertainment & Resorts Company. The arena has a seating capacity for hockey of 7,286 people and with standing room can fit in excess of 8,000.
… When built in 1936 as the Hershey Sports Arena, the building was the largest monolithic structure in the United States in which not a single seat suffered from an obstructed view. For 64 years, from 1938 to 2002, it was the home of the Hershey Bears [AZ: pun alert!] hockey team. The second sport at the arena was basketball. It hosted the PIAA basketball and wrestling championships, and it also served as the home of the Hershey Impact, a National Professional Soccer League team from 1988 to 1991. It has also hosted the Ice Capades, Disney on Ice, professional boxing, tennis competitions, and [various World Wrestling Federation (WWF) events]
Hershey PA is about 45 miles from Reading via US 422, which goes on from there to Harrisburg, the state capital. In addition to the Hershey chocolate factory (providing tours — on several class trips for my schools) and the gigantic barn-like arena, there’s a large amusement park (where I spent many happy hours as a child) and the Milton Hershey School (for boys only in my day), which provides cost-free housing and education for kids in need. My family drove fairly often to the Hershey Arena for Bears hockey games and the Ice Capades.
The two nouns capade. The lexicographic pay dirt. The (considerably reorganized) Wiktionary entry for capade has two senses:
1 (usually in combination, in proper nouns) An exhibition or event, usually for entertainment.
— from reanalysis of Ice Capades, itself a pun on escapade, as, actually, ice + capades ‘capades on ice’; cites for Horse-capades, an exhibition of the horses and chariots from the movie Ben-Hur (1960), BusCapade and JetCapade, world travel jaunts for the magazine USA Today (1988), mice-capade, an animated movie featuring mice (1999), (Mickey Katz’s) Borscht Capades, Catskills-style comedy shows (2013)2 (usually in combination) An adventure.
— from extraction of the –capade of escapade as a libfix; cites for lunch-capade ‘escapade at lunch’ (2006), sexcapades ‘sexual escapades’ (2010), (childhood) bike-capades ‘escapades on a bike’ (2012)
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