You asked this before.
And got pretty much the same answer.
So I did… Huh. Well, that was six years ago, and my memory is not what it was…
I was just trying to search for a reference that might give an answer and the Dope was the only one even to ask the question.
Possibilities: it wasn’t on the Tonight Show, with Carson or anyone else; it was some other burlesque star; it never happened and your uncle liked telling stories.
Smells UL to me. Like The Newlywed Game and “Up the butt, Bob.”
Millions claim to have seen it, but it never happened.
Uh, isn’t that the one urban legend that turned out to be true?
Yes but the myth of it happened - on the Johnny Carson Show.
Yes, but people still insist that the contestant was actually a Black woman who said “DAT BE DA BUTT, BOB!”, when she was actually a white woman who said “In the ass.”
Maybe. Here’s Snopes on the topic with the actual clip and we never learn from her own lips what she really said:
I’m willing to accept the UL as semi-true.
That’s definitely true.
I think that was a Saturday Night Live bit, with Dana Carvey portraying Johnny Carson as a defense attorney for O. J. Simpson, in place of Johnny Cochran. As Carnac, Carvey was trying to divine the contents of a mysterious envelope that was a key piece of evidence in the trial that the defense was able to suppress. And O.J., of course, played for the Bills.
When I was growing up in the 80’s, the college cheer was fading out, but still in use. I think the meaning was well-known just because of all the youngsters asking “what does that mean, anyway?” and enough grandparents still around to explain it. Plus, consider the age skew of Late Night with Johnny Carson in the 80’s. Many viewers would’ve had direct or near-direct knowledge of it.
So while it was already old at the time, most viewers would’ve known it was a bomb onomatopoeia.
Or they saw the Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Yeah, i was talking to the daughter of a friend of mine, and she was calling a stupid person a “George”- which comes from the Bugs cartoon “I will hug him and squeeze him and call him… George”- a parody of “Of Mice and men””. Many people had their only introduction to Opera from Bugs,
The way I ‘remember’ it, it was ‘May a diseased yak hide in your mother’s hope chest.’ He may have done it again with ‘sister’, but it’s funnier with ‘mother’ because of the implication.
What Bugs me about people calling stupid people ‘George’ because of the cartoon is that the dumb person was not named George. The smart person was George. The big lummox was Lennie.
Yep, and I make that same point. The book is very sad.
For that matter, “Nimrod” meaning “idiot” probably also stems from Bugs Bunny. The original Nimrod, in the Bible, was an accomplished hunter. Bugs called Elmer Fudd that sarcastically, to mock his lack of hunting skill. But to viewers unfamiliar with the biblical reference, it was just a generic insult.
It doesn’t help matters that “nimrod” sounds like it should be an insult, à la “nitwit” or “numbskull.”
I’m going to Straight Dope this and mention that it wasn’t Bugs Bunny, it was Daffy Duck. The video mentions Bugs, but there’s no instance of him using it, at least that I can find.
Good point.