It’s from a NURSERY RHYME which I think is wild
Here is the whole thing
That page doesn’t mention where it is from, or when, does it?
No it isn’t!
I was going to mention the Beastie Boys song but I see someone ninja’d me by thirteen years.
It’s already been mentioned that the phrase is from elocution exercises (and also as a tongue twister), and that its greatest popularity probably stems from Curt Siodmak’s 1942 novel Donovan’s Brain.
But I disagree about it being derived directly from Siodmak’s novel. His novel was filmed three times:
It’s the 1953 movie that is the most seen (I’ve seen it, but not the other two versions). Even though Stephen King talks about the novel in his own Danse Macabre, I’ll bet he saw the movie first.
This is one of those pop culture appearances of “The Brain the the Aquarium” , in this case, that of titular rich guy Warren Donovan. Even though without limbs or sensory apparatus, Donovan can still telepathically contact others and even control their actions, protecting himself, taking vengeance, and so forth, until he himself is destroyed. The movie co-stars Nancy Davis just after she married Ronald Reagan. I leave conjectures about a stronger brain controlling another to the imagination of the reader.
Curt Siodmak was a screenwriter who emigrated from Germany, and I suspect took elocution lessons to moderate his German accent, and so may have encountered the phrase in one of his own exercises. Siodmak deserves to be better known. He wrote a lot of science fiction and fantasy novels and screenplays, including FP1 Doesn’t Answer about a Floating Platform in the mid-Atlantic where the short-distance airplanes of the time could stop and refuel (never built, of course). He was important in Universal Pictures’ horror series. He wrote the screenplay for The Wolfman, and wrote the rhyme about him – “Even a man who goes to church by day…”. He’s the one who (tongue in cheek) suggested the idea for “Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman”, and is one of the men responsible for promoting the idea that vampires dissolve under sunlight. He scripted a lot of science fiction and horror in the 1940s and 1950s, ranging from pretty good to the truly awful, and died in 2000.