That’s the weird thing about this. Many people on the Internet think they remember hearing it said in some movie or television show, but no one has been able to track it down. If you do a Google search for the quote, you’ll see that people have asked about it on IMDB, Snopes, Yahoo Answers, Wikipedia and other places. Earl Snake-Hips Tucker seems to have found the only real source for the quote. It is weird, because like most other people here, I’ve never watched Burke’s Law, but I still remember hearing it somewhere.
I really think people are not actually recalling this quote. This is a trick that memory plays on you. I doubt that anyone on this board has ever heard that quote anywhere other than in a question asking where it came from.
I should say, the first time I actually read the quote it didn’t strike me as all that familiar. In fact, the first thing it made me think of was the episode of the Simpsons where Lisa says she has a rock that keeps tigers away, but that’s obviously not the answer. After reading the quote several times, with people suggesting they’ve heard it in the voice of Gene Wilder or Danny Devito, or others, it has managed to work its way into my mind. Or maybe I just never heard the original quote in the first place. 
Still, great find, Earl Snake-Hips Tucker.
Wow! This is like finding free energy! Solving the JFK murder! Figuring out 14 k of g in a f p d! You’re putting the SMDB back on the map!!
OK, maybe not, but it’s a pretty damn remarkable find. Congrats!
Don’t mind me, I’m just getting in on a thread that’s destined to become the most viewed in SDMB history.
You know, I bet he’s fibbing about that machine. I think it actually manufactures shock-resistant prescription reading glasses.
Congratulations Earl.
It wouldn’t surprise me if some other show/movie contains the infamous quote only a little bit closer to everyone’s “memory” of the exact phrasing.
Count me with Scruloose as far as getting in the thread
I watched the clip last night and it sounds close enough to me. I can’t say I actually recall the exact quote with “It doesn’t do anything” anyway.
Agree 100%. Great work by Earl discovering the probable first use of the phrase or near-phrase, but surely the public conscience is not remembering an obscure episode of an obscure TV show from 50 years ago. Surely this was said again in a movie or show from the 70’s or 80’s, which is the one most people who recall it are recalling.
I’m massively impressed that we have a source here, even though, as some have said, it’s more interesting that the quote sounds familiar to so many people who have not seen that episode. However, I’d like to point out that this amazing machine DOES, in fact, do something - something terribly important. In **Samclem’s ** reference, we see this:
"Harold Harold is in the room tinkering with a complex Rube Goldberg machine. Bongs and various other noises emit from it… It doesn’t do anything, that’s the beauty of it, it’s his rebellion against efficiency. "
The machine makes bongs!! Tell me that’s nothing.
It’s the ancestor of the machine that goes PING!
Yes, we’d better get that in the O.R. just in case the Administrator drops by.
Just to summarize what I’m taking from this thread and Earl Snake-Hips Tucker’s amazing find, I’m almost positive I never saw the episode in the clip. I may have seen an episode of Burke’s Law (and thus maybe this episode) but I am as nearly certain that I saw or heard this bit elsewhere.
I’m led to conclude that wherever the bit originated, and I can accept that it may not be the one Earl Snake-Hips Tucker has located, it most likely has been reused any number of times in any number of settings. The specifics of where each of us who remember it actually saw or heard it can vary – and obviously do – but the fact that none of us, until now, could find the instance we saw or heard, just goes to indicate how trivial it would have been at the time we first encountered it and thus how weak the memory of it has been.
Knowing that this one case exists just goes to prove we weren’t dreaming, and that we can trust our memories to some extent. That’s the lesson that matters to me.
I want to point out that Twilight Zone has been heavily rerun on Sci-Fi, so the episode’s exposure is likely greater because of that. It’s also the sort of quote that morning radio-show types might sample to use as random sound bytes.
Which season of TZ was it from?
It wasn’t on the Twilight Zone; it was on Burke’s Law.
And some people upthread are saying that they believe the popularity of the quote is from some other usage in another television show or movie. The problem is that despite all of the discussion about this (and there has been quite a bit on several messageboards) I don’t believe that anyone has been able to identify any usage of anything similar anywhere else, and certainly nothing earlier.
D’oh! You’re right. I saw the comment about it being like Twilight Zone, and assumed the subsequent information about Burke’s Law, et cetera, was the episode title.
Still could be morning radio show types to blame, though.
Whenever I see that, I always think of Jack Lemmon in “Mister Roberts” saying it, but not quite. I’m thinking it must have been used in a commercial at one time for so many people to remember it but there be no trace*
*Other than the Burke’s Law cite, which I’m almost certain I’ve never seen.
You could be right about that. Some of the morning radio shows do use odd little sound clips between segments, so perhaps they popularized this quote. I wonder if there’s any way to confirm that.
…and the precursor to Scientific Progress, which is rumoured to go BOINK.
Got link?
I beleive what we’re seeing here is the development of a cultural meme.