But not The The.
[nitpick]Lindy[/nitpick]
That one annoys me. So many people seem to just think it’s a funny quote from a tv show or a movie or something, and laugh about it. If they realised that it was real, and that it was uttered in despair by a woman whose two month old daughter Azaria had been taken by a dingo, never to be seen again, they might not laugh so heartily. I think learning that Lindy was found guilty of murdering the child and sentenced to life imprisonment, only to have her conviction overturned six years later when new evidence was discovered might further wipe the smile from their faces. The woman not only lost her child and spent six years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit, she also missed out on the earliest years of her daughter Kahlia’s life - the child she was pregnant with at the time of her conviction. She continued to be vilified as a murderess by a certain segment of the population who didn’t believe in her innocence and has had to deal with the periodic appearance of nutjobs like Frank Cole.
Call me humourless, but I just don’t find “A dingo took my baby!” to have any inherent comedic value.
I looked in the OED, and it seems the earliest known usage of this phrase was actually 1936. Though Junger’s book certainly popularized it.
(And his book came out in 1997)
I guess we’re both humorless, Cazzle, cause I’m totally with you.
The phrase “Are we having fun yet?” is from the comic Zippy the Pinhead (1979/1980). The first time I saw that on a bumper sticker I thought, “Yow! Zippy’s hit the big time!” and then I realized that most people have no idea.
What about chazwazzers?
The Malonga Gilderchuck?
Vegemite?
::tap tap::
Is this thing on?
It’s funny when it happens to someone else
How many people have heard the phrase “jump the shark” without knowing it’s a reference to “Happy Days”? And how many people who know “Happy Days” remember that it got its start as a segment on “Love, American Style”?
Everybody knows about tasers. But how many people know that they take their name from pulp science fiction hero Tom Swift?
I knew that, but I only knew it because of seeing it on That’s Incredible.
“By George, I think she’s got it!”
… I don’t know if it’s actually FROM My Fair Lady (or Pygmalion?), but that’s the only time I’ve ever heard it uttered in a way that didn’t sound like it was quoting something else. It’s got to be from something, anyway…
Well, exactly. Like all humor, it’s funny only if you distance yourself emotionally from the source. And, at the risk of destroying humor through deconstruction, it’s funny for a few reasons: one, it’s always said in a ridiculously exaggerated Australian accent, which adds all sorts of dipthongs (vowel transitions) that sound absurd: “The deeiingeeeooo aayte maye baaayyybeeee!” Secondly, few people in the US are clear on what, exactly, a dingo is. A wolf? A rat? A coyote? A type of cheese? Frankly, it sounds like a made-up child’s word for male genitalia. Finally, it was imported here during the phase of events where everyone was certain that the mother was a lying hysterical guilty bitch. It’s become a catch-phrase for “ridiculous defense that nobody would believe for a second.” As in: “John, do you have those profit/loss statements for me?” “Oh, man, I would, but just this morning on the way to work, a dingo ate my baybay!” It became the new and hip “The dog ate my homework.”
I understand that she was actually right, and it was a horrible tragic thing that your law enforcement did to her. And we did, in quiet tones and mostly in somber regret, eventually hear that she was not guilty. But there were a whole lot of years the phrase was in use and then out of use before that happened.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t hear it said for years until Lost, when Claire’s whiney Australian voice started shrieking about her “baybay” on every episode. I think that reminded a lot of people of the dingo phrase, but by now we’ve forgotten again that the poor mother wasn’t lying. We’re not really a people to let the truth stand in the way of a funny line. But it had about a two week resurgence and it’s died off again.
So it was funny when the mother had murdered her baby and blamed wild dogs but lost the humour when it became apparent that wild dogs actually had done it?
Ok, I get the point you’re making but I still shudder whenever I hear it used in jest. I’ve laughed at “dead baby” jokes in the past, but they aren’t as funny when there is an actual, real dead baby involved. The miscarriage of justice perpetrated on her family just cinches the deal for me.
And I made an error in my earlier post - she was jailed for three and a half years, not six.
I always thought of it as making fun of Meryl Streep taking herself way too seriously.
Yes.
Just like it’s not funny when the dog actually eats your homework.
It wouldn’t be funny if Twinkies really did make someone murder people.
It wouldn’t be funny if OJ really did find the real killer.
It’s the outrageousness of the excuse that’s funny, in a WTF way, not the actions that prompted the excuse.
ETA:
Woah, then we did not get the news in a timely fashion. I only heard that her case was overturned about three years ago. And now that I think on it, I think I heard it first on this board, not from an American newspaper.
I think, entirely robbed of context, it was Elaine’s use of the “Dingo ate your baby” line on Seinfeld that really popularized it.
Human beings have unlimited ingenuity in making jokes about tragedy.
Then there’s also the Tom Swiftie, a type of joke which plays on the book series’ penchant for adjectives after the word “said.” E.g. “I dropped my toothpaste,” Tom said crestfallenly.
That’s an adverb. Man, I could nitpick all day and never get tired of it.
And Oz’s band on Buffy the Vampire Slayer was called “Dingoes Ate My Baby”
Well, that’s what I get for trusting Wikipedia. I should know better. (You’re right about 1997 though, that’s just poor reading comprehension on my part :smack: )
Ah, yes. I had misremembered my Schoolhouse Rock. Back to the drawing board, I said sketchily.
Where does “tipping point” come from? It seems to be a recent usage like “perfect storm” but i’m sure i’m wrong.
All Your Base Are Belong To Us = some obscure Japanese videogame?
Where does Kimo Sabay come from? I’ve heard that a few times.