Right, but I’m just messing with the monkey to see what kind of funny thing will happen. I’m not doing it for any particular reason. I’m a rowdy youth walking around kicking trashcans and pocketing unguarded property.
Having messed with the monkey, which curiously turned into a wrench, I had one when I needed it.
Monkey + banana is as simple as it can get. Monkey is too focused on metronome to notice banana presents a logical path to take. Imo the Monkey Island solution to the try everything problem is to make everything funny so you want to try all kinds of stuff to see what will happen, much more so than making everything “logical” or having a “reason” to do something. It’s par for the course.
Maybe MI2 is just a flawed game. I certainly experienced several “monkey wrench” moments in it myself. But the monkey wrench wasn’t one of them. Most notably or at least most memorably the Dinky island jungle puzzle with the audio.
(By contrast, in Tales that puzzle was easy because it was just a repeat.)