This week’s question:
As I get older, I’m finding that relics of my pop-culture past fade from the top of people’s memories but remain in mine. For example, I will call people “farging iceholes” and “bastages,” quotes from the little-remembered and little-loved movie Johnny Dangerously, a Michael Keaton/Joe Piscopo mob comedy from 1984. I guess I say it to myself because it still makes me laugh, but outside of my high-school friends, who remembers it? So my question is, what bit of pop-cultural ephemera still sticks in your own personal quote machine that few people get?
Sean O’Neal
Charles, I think perhaps you and I should form a Johnny Dangerously Appreciation Society: That’s one of the most strip-mined fields in all the acres of pop-culture ephemera in my brain robbing valuable space from more useful things, like science and the ability to make small talk. I’m annoyingly fond of Joe Piscopo’s “You shouldn’t hang me on a hook, Johnny. My father hung me on a hook once. Once.” routine, as it works in pretty much all situations where somebody does something I don’t like, but which doesn’t merit an actual, more germane form of protest. (“It shoots through schools” is also a useful, though usually completely meaningless, way to say something is really powerful, and I’ve been known to break the ice with Ma Kelly’s “We’re both swell lookers, and neither of us is Chinese” line. Yeah, that always goes over well.) Around my old video store, where I worked with perhaps the only people I’ve ever met who appreciated 1987’s Real Men as much as I did, we used to call each other out on our general slack-assitude with “Did I tell you you’re doing a good job today?” and unfortunately, I haven’t ever run across anyone outside those walls who finds that funny. Same with Dave Foley’s “I’m not being sarcastic, this is just a speech impediment” bit from Kids In The Hall, which, removed from its context, just makes you sound like a giant asshole. (Not that that’s ever stopped me.) I’m also a big fan of the total non-sequitur quote, such as Jack Nance’s “There was a fish in the percolator” line from Twin Peaks, which is useful whenever something (though especially an appliance) breaks. Ditto my absolute favorite, albeit slightly amended Simpsons quote, “Elephants like peanuts,” which is a greatly utilitarian, borderline-Zen response to any confusing question or complex set of instructions.
Josh Modell
Asking this question around here is a bit like asking, “Do you know any words?” Sometimes the entire workday is literally us quoting pop-culture ephemera. (“Literally? You literally shit your pants?” —David Cross) So I’ll just fire a few at you that get some semi-regular use. When there’s any sort of debate, a line from Pee-wee’s Big Adventure often solves the problem: “I say we let him go!” (The mere mention of that line in a meeting on Wednesday set us all giggling.) When you want to agree with something most solemnly, you can always adopt the voice of Omar Little from The Wire and simply say, “In-deed.” When you want to insult a whole group of people in front of a person in that group, you have two choices: There’s either “Not you, Zaxxon, you’re one of the good ones” from Mr. Show’s “Racist In The Year 3000” sketch, or “I meant those other assholes” from Natural Born Killers. None of those are terribly old or obscure, so here’s one that falls into the latter category, at least: There’s a really weird kid named Harry in the spelling-bee documentary Spellbound, and often when I see strange, overly smart, but totally ingratiating little nerd kids, I’ll turn to my wife and say, “I am a musical robot.”
Tasha Robinson
Geez, Charles. There are times when I don’t think my boyfriend and I actually communicate in anything but quotes from The Simpsons, movies we’ve seen together, TV shows we saw separately in our youth, and the old Woody Allen comedy albums and books we bonded over when we first met. (“Lord, why dost thou kill my kine? Now I am short kine, and kine are hard to come by.”) Some of our most repeated-over-time quotes come from a show that was pretty popular among our circle: The 1994 animated incarnation of The Tick: “What kind of corn soldiers are you?” is our shorthand version of “What are you doing?” or “Why are you wearing that?” “Eating kittens is just plain wrong!” is a useful protest in any situation where we disapprove of each other, and so is “NOW you’re doing it on PURPOSE.” “Shiny objects are good!” is an acknowledgement that one of us was distracted and missed something the other was saying. And “READ A BOOK!” comes in handy whenever someone else misses a reference. On the more obscure tip, we unfortunately quote Inframan, a terrible 1975 Japanese monster movie, more than is really healthy—mostly “It’s weird!” “If you are ever frozen in liquid ice, use your missiles to thaw you out. You must use three missiles,” and “Thunderball fists? I can have such a thing?” Most recently, the boyfriend weirded me out when he started repeatedly referring to our house pets with the phrase “They’re… cats. I’ve never been fond of… cats.” Eventually I realized he was misquoting a character from one of the first episodes of Thundercats, a show he never really watched. I’m betting even most of our pop-culture-loving, South Park-referencing, Tick-quoting friends aren’t going to figure that one out.
Possibly the dumbest quotes that have stuck with me forever are from ’80s TV ads, though. Like “Parts is parts! Little tiny pieces parts!” from a fast-food ad (for Wendy’s, maybe?) disparaging McNuggets. To this day, I tend to thank my family (who actually get it, and join in on the chicken imitation at the end) with a phrase from an old Cadbury Chocolate Eggs commercial: “Thanks, Easter Bunny! Bock bock!” God, shoot me now. The one I always have to bite back, though, for fear of offending people, is “Nobody boddas me! Nobody boddas me eitha!” from this TV commercial for Jhoon Rhee martial-arts classes that was ubiquitous on the local Maryland channels of my youth:
Leonard Pierce
Oh, boy! Finally, a legitimate reason for the comments to be nothing but a quotefest! As with every other helpless pop-culture dork, it sometimes seems to me that there is no situation in life for which there is not an appropriate Simpsons quote, and much of my internal monologue consists of various snippets of your workaday geek constellation: Mr. Show, the Coen brothers, Monty Python, and anything that aired on HBO or Adult Swim about four years ago. But since the point here seems to be obscurity rather than universality, I’ll stick to three that are relatively little-known, but that my friends and I inject into constant conversation: any episode of Home Movies in which the brilliant Andy Kindler plays Mr. Lindenson, especially his perfectly delivered line “Not a bad joke… but a bad time for jokes”; Albert Brooks’ hilariously prescient reality-show satire Real Life, from which, among other lines, we love to lift his viciously sarcastic epithet “Dr. Cup” to describe anyone smarter than we are; and most of all, the stunning William Peter Blatty film The Ninth Configuration, which, before it turned into a staggeringly heavy psychological thriller about halfway through, was the most endlessly quotable comedy until The Big Lebowski came along. I quote tons of its lines in everyday conversation: “I want you to drop like an overripe mango” is as useful a go-to office insult as “I break the arrow of peace” is a threat. “Independent snots! Shape up or ship out!”—yelled by a character at the atoms in a wall—is a great thing to shout for no reason. And as vague mystic pronouncements go, you can’t beat my favorite character, Lt. Reno, claiming “Any idiot can dig up a tree, and then anyone with money can fill in the hole.” While I’ve never found a way to incorporate Capt. Cutshaw’s line “I think the end of the world just came for the Fritos I had in my pocket” in normal life, it is on my list of things to do before I die.