Most of the catchphrases in the old loony tunes cartoons originated elsewhere, in popular radio shows, etc. This one has been driving me crazy for a while: I can’t find any information on the net. So, where did the phrase “I’m only three and a half years old”, used in several Bugs Bunny cartoons in particular, come from?
Maybe Fanny Brice’s “Baby Snooks” character?
http://members.aol.com/EOCostello/i.html
I was unable to find any other information about it, or what it has to do with Lou Costello.
Actually, it has to do with Little Audrey.
Obviously played by an adult actress, she was a recurrent character on the Abbott & Costello radio program, and this was her familiar catch phrase, often used as a walk-on line.
Thus:
Abbott: Costello, that’s not funny!
Audrey: Well, I thought it was amusing, but I’m only three and a half years old.
Abbott: "Why, it’s Little Audrey!!!
(Thunderous applause from the studio audience).
IIRC, the character was generally depicted as being just a couple of notches above Costello in mental acuity.
16 years later and I’ve just come across this thread.
With regards to the phrase originating with the Abbott and Costello show, this is simply incorrect. Abbott and Costello filmed their show for TV from 1952 onwards. As mentioned before in this thread already, Bob Clampett’s 1944 Merry Melodies cartoon Russian Rhapsody features a small gremlin smashing at the instrument panel of a plane with a mallet before uttering the exact same line, as can be seen here. so unless there’s been some time travel involved, the gremlin couldn’t have possibly heard the line from watching Abbott and Costello on TV when it was 8 years prior to the TV shows actually existing.
As I pointed out in a thread several months backj, “Little Audrey” was the name of a character in a series of actually pretty sadistic and mostly dirty jokes in the early 20th Century:
I stumbled across this in looking up old humor, and was startled because my first acquaintance with “Little Audrey” was with the Famous Studios cartoon character (which they started advancing as a substitute for Little Lulu. They had to pay roylaties to use Lulu, but not on Audrey). It seemed believable, but kinda nasty, that the idiot subject of salacious humor would be cleaned up and used as a kiddie cartoon character.
I had no idea that she’d been used previously as a character in a radio show starring a couple of vaudevillians. But it makes an even more plausible transition. a lot of vaudeville humor was kinda blue and came in by way of burlesque. Even a lot of Abbott and Costello’s material was essentially cleaned-up burlesque material. I could see them naming a sweet character “Little Audrey”, and I could see some Fleischer Studio/Famous Studio animator or gag man in turn re-using it as a cartoon character’s name.
And as for Warner Brothers cartoons directly lifting a gag from radio, they did that all the time. “Foghorn Leghorn” himself, and his whole “southern bluster” act, is a direct ripoff of Kenny Delmar’s “Senator Claghorn” on The Fred Allen Show. They basically stole his act.
Christopher Miller has a section on Little Audrey in his American Cornball, an encyclopedic look at oddball things that once tickled funny bones in American popular culture. He does seem to take his examples from Botkin, though, so I’m not sure he has much to add. I just wanted to recommend the book, which is new yet obscure. As an encyclopedia, read it in bits and pieces.
Since this is about a cartoon catchphrase, let’s move it to Cafe Society, which didn’t exist when this thread was started in 2003.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I wonder if Little Audrey was the inspiration behind Lily Tomlin’s “Edith Ann” character?
“My name is Edith Ann, and I’m only five and a half years old.”
Originally on Laugh-In she said she was five years old, not five and a half.
I doubt that Little Audrey inspired Edith Ann. The styles of humor are very different.
I bought a copy of this a couple of months ago. I found a hard cover copy on sale, which is better because it has a lot of the illustrations in color.
It’s a hoot. I think I wasted a week on that book.
When I opened this thread I thought it was going to be about Munro, an animated short about a child mistakenly drafted into the Army, despite his continued protests that “I’m only four.”
Another Little Audrey joke, which I somehow remember having seen in my mom’s high school yearbook - mid 1930s, maybe:
“Little Audrey saw a mail-order catalog listing for a bed that was 7’ by 7’, but she just laughed and laughed because she knew that was a lot of bunk.”
Silly and formulaic, sure, but I wouldn’t have called it particularly nasty.
Nobody would have allowed anything nasty in a yearbook. Not in the 1930s and not in my 1960s. I’ll bet very few if any yearbooks would allow most Little Audrey jokes in today’s 2010s.
Sorry folks,
My mistake. I didn’t read the thing properly. Yes, it makes sense if it comes from the radio show as that originated before the Looney Tunes version. Here in Australia we only had the TV show when I were a lad so I was unaware of the radio version. We might have had it on the airwaves, but completely before my time.
The listing on Tv Tropes for the WB cartoon Russian Rhapsody says
Costello was known for saying “I’m a baaaaaaaad boy.”
This stands in disagreement with slipster’s post above:
So, which is the real situation?
1.) Slipster’s memory has slipped, and the character wasn’t named “Little Audrey”
2.) TV Tropes is wrong, and the character wasn’t name “Martha”
3.) They’re both right – the show used two differently-named characters with the same catchphrase
4.) They’re both wrong. The character’s name was _______
5.) Everybody’s wrong. The catchphrase didn’t come from Abbott and Costello’s show, but from ______.
I never heard any of A&C’s radio shows, so I don’t know. A quick search of the internet doesn’t find anything associating either Little Audrey or Martha with the show.
Billy Gray was born in 1938. He really WOULD have been three and a half years old during the A&C show’s run, but his Wikipedia page gives him no credit for it (although he did appear – with his mom – in the A&C film Abbott and Costello meet the Killer, years later).(He was the boy in the original Day the Earth Stood Still) He’s still around, btw.
Okay, it was apparently a different Biily Gray:
This assertion, unlike the others, comes with a citation:
(4) Variety, January 12th, 1943, pg. 7.
Okay – another possibility. Was it really Matilda, not Little Audrey or Martha, who said the phrase?
Inquiring minds want to know.