"Nobody loves me..."

“…Everybody hates me. I’m going to eat some worms!”

This is something is used to hear my older sister say when I was a very young kid. Has anyone else heard it? Does come from a book? Movie? TV show? Or was it just some sing-songy thing she made up on her own? (I intend to ask her next time we talk.)

It’s an old children’s song/rhyme.

I’m born in the 1960s - I’ve heard that one, just as one of those things that kids spread around like “Jingle Bells, Batman smells” and infections.

As children, my siblings and I learned this from my mom. When one of us was pouting over something, she’d sing the first verses of the song to jolly us out of our funk. Then the rest of us would pick up the tune as well, which, of course, was no help at all.

Well, that’s rather… nauseating!

In one of Beverly Cleary’s books, Ramona the Pest told all the kids at a party that Fig Newtons were filled with ground-up worms. :persevere:

I first heard it on a Kids in the Hall sketch. When I started singing it around the house, my mother told me she used to sing it when she was a kid.

I was going to mention the Kids in the Hall sketch as well, but I knew it from childhood even before that.

Yes, and like most such things, there are many different variants of the wording.

We sang it when I was in elementary school starting about 1955 or 56.

I have a vague recollection of strongly disliking it when other little kids sang it at camp. Also 1950’s; probably around '58.

Definitely an old song, but not sure how old. I’ve seen one claim dating it to the 1860s but I’m not convinced by that.

Around these parts, it was:
Nobody loves me, everybody hates me
I eat worms all day
First you bite the heads off
Then you suck the guts out
Then you throw the skins away

Short ones, fat ones, tall ones, skinny ones
Itsy bitsy fuzzy wuzzy worms

I bite off their heads
And suck out their guts
And throw their skins away
Nobody knows how I survive
On worms three times a day

(I, personally, would never harm a worm.)

I wonder if the song shares a writer in whatever kid penned “Great big gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts…”

Spanish version

And the baby bumblebee song. Wee Weasel hates that song. He makes me turn it off every time. I think he can’t imagine anything worse than having gross stuff all over his hands.

“Turn it off”? Wait, does that mean you have a recording of it? When I was a kid, songs like these were passed along strictly by word of mouth, which is how it should be. It just seems Wrong for there to be professionally made recordings of them.

(Just as it seems Wrong to me for there to be mass-produced, commercially available Rice Krispie treats. Rice Krispie treats should only ever be homemade and brought to potlucks and bake sales.)

There’s at least one recording of every kid’s song you can imagine including a bunch of ones I had never heard before. On an infinite loop.

Although lately he’s more into Broadway tunes.

I’m always fascinated by the origin of things like this.

Did one person come up with it? Many people and it got refined over time? Did it pop into existence spontaneously out of the aether? Is there any way to ever know? Does the person that first came up with these kids songs know they came up with it?

As for the OP, I never actually heard it until college, used ironically (isn’t everything in college used ironically?). Pretty sure no one sang it in my grade school peer group.