I was watching an episode of The Goldbergs. If you don’t already know, this is a sitcom that is supposed to take place sometime in the 80’s. In the episode, something unfortunate happens to one of the kids in the show. His respone was “Balls!” as in “Damn!” or “Shit!”
I was a teenager in the 80’s and I don’t remember this ever being a thing. In fact, the first time I ever heard it was with Penny in The Big Bang Theory."
So, was this a screw up with the producers? Or do any of you remember this being a saying pre-90’s?
You’re more likely to hear the euphemism for “balls” (“Nuts!”) but the fact that there is an euphemism for the word suggests that it was used commonly at some point.
In Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, the titular character (played by Neil Patrick Harris) says it at the end of the song A Man’s Got to Do. He’s disgusted that his archrival (and local superhero) Captain Hammer claimed responsibility for saving local lovely (and Dr. H’s crush) Penny from an out-of-control van, and snarls “Balls!” at the end of the song.
“Nuts!” was one of Inspector Cramer’s favorite interjections in the Nero Wolfe novels, which started publication in what, the mid-30s? In the case of the sitcom, though, I suspect it’s just something they can slip past the censors.
The erudite Gershon Legman, in Bawdy Monologues and Rhymed Recitations (Southern Folklore Quarterly 40(1976), 59-122), gives the date of an early version of the piece as 1959, but the exclamation is undoubtedly much earlier.
I recall hearing The Night of the King’s Castration when I was in college in the early 1970s.
Bobby Singer (Jim Beaver from afc-a) on Supernatural is the only place I’ve heard it; I think he started with “Weekend at Bobby’s” but it could have been before. I’ve never heard it IRL, where there are no censors to worry about and better alternatives abound.