Person makes a witty remark involving some sort of word play or clever transposition of ideas. Follows up with ‘Did you see what I did there?’, as a wry post-modern, knowing way of drawing attention to the fact that they just managed a witty remark. Or one of the others present follows up with, ‘I see what you did there’.
Perhaps I’ve been living under a rock and this phrase (used in this way) has been around forever, but in my own experience it has gained massive currency over the past 12-18 months and is now encountered on a regular basis in real life and in the media.
I appreciate that tracing the gestation of popular expressions is often futile, and that language just evolves without any rules, but does this particular phrase used in this way come from anything? Did someone start it off or popularise it? Can anyone shed any light at all on why this has caught on?
I am friendly with the family of a rather famous stand-up comedian, and I first heard them using it. I asked the origin, and they told me it’s from a movie called Mr Saturday Night starring Billy Crystal as a failing stand-up. He makes a lame joke, nobody laughs, so he says “did you see what I did there?” and then proceeds to ruin the joke by explaining it. Stuff like “I coulda gone this way, but I went the other way - I did the ol’ switcheroo” (this is all second-hand, as I haven’t seen the movie).
The UK stand-up community started to use it a couple of years ago, and it’s spread from there. Pleasingly, I used it in conversation with another successful stand-up I know, and he’d never heard it - now he uses it in his act.
For what it’s worth, Billy Crystal uses the line in When Harry Met Sally, which predates Mr. Saturday Night. Nora Ephron wrote the former, Crystal himself co-wrote the latter, but it’s entirely possible the line is Crystal’s own, or (more likely), a throwaway used by the Borscht Belt comedians Crystal likes to reference (such as Mr. Saturday Night himself).