Origin?
It depends. Where are you from?
Are you asking about the original joke or the Tina Fey quote(esque) of Palin?
That’s Russia.
I mean the meme that any time someone gets shot up in the air real high in a movie, TV show, or cartoon, they say, “I can see my house from here!”
Name a few TV shows, cartoons, and movies in which someone has uttered this line.
Wasn’t there a long thread on humor in the bible? I believe that line was in one of the apocryphal texts.
It was just on Warehouse 13 last night (the character is perched in the rafters of the warehouse, and most certainly her house isn’t in view). Here’s some others. I have a feeling like it was used by the Loony Toons, but I couldn’t swear by it.
ETA: And yet more http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main.ICanSeeMyHouseFromHere
O.K., it seems to be common by the 2000’s, but there’s not much before then. Notice that some of the movies quoted in the link that Sage Rat gives are irrelevant, since they are quotes that contain each of the individual words but not the sentence at all. It looks like the earliest movie that the IMDb lists that contains a quote that includes this sentence is the Veggie Tales episode, but nothing in the plot summary makes it sound like it has anything to do with someone being high in the air and looking down, so I suspect that it’s just a random use of the sentence in some other context having nothing to do with what Sage Rat is asking.
But in any case, I found this page in TV Tropes which gives a lot more instances of this quote:
And here it is in the Urban Dictionary:
I believe it’s also the punchline of a joke.
A guy is about to be executed by hanging. He climbs up the gallows, they put the noose around his neck, and ask if he has any last words. And he says…
Didn’t Charlie say it in the Gene Wilder version of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”?
That’s a lot earlier than the 2000s.
ETA: In the great glass elevator, at the end. I’m going by memory, though, can someone back me up?
ETAagain: Jesus, it’s the first example in WW’s tvtropes link. :smack:
I heard as the punch line of a joke about Jesus on the cross. I first encountered it in the late 70s.
I’m with Tim-n-va, it’s the punch line to an old joke about Jesus on the cross.
I can’t remember the set up now, he calls his disciples, who crowd round to hear his last words of wisdom, and he says, “I can see my house from here.”
George Carlin, in 1981 according to the internet
I don’t know that it’s a joke – the original statement is something a kid says when he gets to a significant height (maybe for the first time) and can see his house from an unfamiliar location.
I remember kids saying this when I was a kid (in the 1960s) and the climbed the hills behind our house. From up there, you could see a lot of the town laid out, with tall buildings like the churches prominent.
The joke aspect comes from an adult in a serious situation (the hanging, or crucifiction cited above) making the same irrelevant, kid-like response of wonder.
But kids were saying this by the 1960s at least. I’m sure it must be much, much older than that.
Perhaps it was Gilgamesh?
Ditto, ca. 1979, except the punchline was "Peter, I can see your house from up here (emphasis added).
It was first uttered by Joseph-Michel Montgolfier in 1783.
I think there was a spoof of this line in the 1993 movie, “Homeward Bound” (2 dogs and a cat trying to get home). In one scene, they get to the top of the mountain expecting to see their home, and the dog, Chance (voiced by Michael J. Fox), says, “You can see everything from up here … except the house. Where’s the house, Shadow?”