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Weekend Discussion Thread: Catch Phrase-itisOkay we may have done something like this before but…
Please keep those thread ideas coming! 70 Replies to “Weekend Discussion Thread: Catch Phrase-itis”Commenting at Satellite News
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Probably my most common is “I like it very much!“, said emphatically and with that particular inflection… you know what I mean. ;)
People may look at me strangely, but I don’t care!
Yes. Yes, I have. When I was out in a very public space and having to listen to some random guy yap endlessly about his thoughts on local restaurants and which ones had the most foodie-worthy menus, I said, a little too loudly, “I’ll give you a cookie if you shut up.” I’m pretty sure no one got the reference, but they did seem to appreciate the sentiment.
well, ‘bite me’ and ‘dickweed’ show up a lot at my house. especially when the family drops by.
but i in general scatter shoot a variety of phrases depending on the situation.
“If you’re like me, and I know I am….” Falls flat every time. But I don’t care.
but there was no monster…
The other day at work, I said to someone who was talking about useless phone apps “Just because it’s futuristic doesn’t mean it’s practical.” They thought it was funny, but didn’t make the MST3K connection.
All the time, in all contexts. “Well, a platypus could do X” (from the short Out of This World) is a current favorite. “Dial 1-800-BITEME” and the related “Email me at biteme.com” are others. “Watch out for snakes!”, exclaimed randomly in vaguely-appropriate contexts. (In fact, my then-10-yr-old son once followed my lead and gleefully shouted “Watch out for snakes!” over and over at a local minor league baseball game, much to his mother’s horror.) There are many others. Most of the time I say them only semi-consciously–they have become such a deeply-ingrained part of my personal vocabulary–and they don’t provoke any particular response, except maybe an eye-roll or two (“Hmph, there he goes with that weird sense of humor again”). Sometimes, though, the uninitiated give me full credit: “Wow! What a unique and original sense of humor!” I just keep quiet and try to look smug and self-content, as though it’s true.
Oh, the S.O. and I go frequently to a plaintive, “and she’s no-o-t,” [“..then my Mom’s a beatnik..”] apropos of virtually anything. ANYTHING. Best Joel line read ev-ver.
Also, we can’t go to HomeDepot while they’re moving inventory around without, “He tried to kill me with a fork lift!”
…and don’t get me started on the Steve-O-Meter…
Thank you. Won’t You?
When writing proposals at work, I sometimes end with “What do you think, sirs?”
So far, no-one’s noticed…
If ham is in front of me or in discussion, I will often say “You think you like ham” out loud, but in my head begin rambling on and on about liking ham.
A perfect one for present opening situations would be, “Hey, this is full of acorns! We’ve been had!”
Whenever I’d watch a coach or player give a pep-talk, after the team would break, I used to say “we put our faith in Blast Hardcheese!!!”
Would get a few laughs from those who got the reference. :)
Down on my friend’s ranch in south Texas they have a Halloween tradition of taking the area children on a haunted hay ride as part of a charity fund raiser. There is a dense grove of oak trees along a creek there that has the reputation of being haunted by a the ghost of a “wild man” and the setup for the hayride is to have someone dressed up as the wild man to jump out and scare everyone. A few years ago I talked the wild man impersonator into pointing at the kids on the wagon and hollering “I SAW THE LITTLE CREATURE” when he emerged from behind a tree. The kids loved it and after the ride chased each other around yelling “I’m the Little Creature!” It was wonderful.
Speaking of fog, I have a habit of remarking, “Even the movie The Fog didn’t have this much fog!”
…and I find that Mike’s scarf toss and effusive, “Bravo! And, brava!” response to Crow and Tom’s reading of Love Letters is often happily accepted in lieu of a gratuity at…OK, nowhere, actually.
Not technically a catch-phrase, but whenever I hear (as I did in a sermon last Sunday) the words “in the not-too distant-future”, I reflexively blurt out… well, you know.
It does tend to garner some quizzical looks.
Especially in church.
And of course some don’t necessarily strike anyone as odd or funny, such as the oft-applicable “why don’t they look?”. That one comes out. A LOT.
On a related note, in response to someone commenting about a “little bit of” something or other, I normally respond that now I’m going to grab “a little bit of lunch”.
Sorry, I use so many of these… but this it certainly one of the more common ones I use out in the wild:
“It stinks!”
I sometimes use, “I always find it in the last place I look ha ha ha” from The Mole People. (Complete with the “ha ha ha”.)
My husband likes to use, “Know him? He was delicious!”
Yeah, I use that one too!
Will someone PLEASE tell me where Joel first got “Weird…which results in creativity!” from, in case other people in the outside world ask me, and I don’t know what to tell them?
I know it’s not from Elementary School Report-Card Euphemisms, otherwise I would have gotten a few in third grade.
And long before PlutoTV’s Buzzr channel started airing the glorious 70’s Gene Rayburn reruns again (along with the crappy recent Alec Baldwin ones), “Warrior of the Lost World” had stuck into my head the habit of applying variations of “‘Hang on to your…’–BLANK, Brett Sommers:” “I said, ‘Hat'” every time someone deliberately leaves a sentence unfinished for effect. Only a few generational fellow-travelers even get the joke anymore.
Not even for next Sunday, A.D.?
(“…He tampered in God’s domain.” Fortunately, that’s also already from the cult-overexposed 50’s sci-fi B-movie itself, so you can get away with that in public.)
Quite often, I’m sure much too often, like almost every day OK? It’s a great way to check to see if anyone is actually listening to what you are saying!
I utilize MST3K-isms so often, in fact, I can’t even site any particular favorites, although when I point at my strange friend Mike, and exclaim “You gonna be da worm face!” he cracks up every time.
When we log onto Netflix, my wife and I will variously say to each other: “We’ll be me for convenience’ sake.”
A side story: my wife and I were visiting America’s Stonehenge in Salem, NH last year, and when we got back to our car after touring the site, we discovered our car battery was dead dead DEAD! As we sat in the car waiting for the tow truck, I grabbed a pad of paper and a pen, and we played hangman, using MST3K catchphrases. “No Lupita, Stealing Is Wrong,” was one I remember we used. “Trumpy, You Can Do Stupid Things” was another. Good times!
We started taking second and third looks at Seasons 11 and 12, and I’m surprised and happy that several eps are definitely set for repeated viewing. And the new catchphrases that’ll stick are starting to bubble to the surface.
Guarantee you in writing that at some point in the near future, my mouth is going to open and Patton Oswalt’s “Oh, GOD! The sled crashed…” is going to come out.
I used to try to do the Bela Lugosi hand thing (and a World’s Fastest Hypnotist “SLEEP!”) to my niece all the time when she was younger.
I play a very dumb android game called “Egg, Inc.” You start with a chicken house, hatch some chickens, sell eggs to pay for research to increase your laying rate, buy absurdly expensive upgraded chicken houses, etc. Every now and then on the sub-reddit r/eggsinc some brainiac will calculate how fast the eggs must be flying out of the hens’ hind ends to create the observed rate of egg production. (Most fully automatic rifles can only dream.)
I once replied to one of these jokers, “If you’re wondering how they eat and breed and other science facts, repeat to yourself it’s just a game, I should really just relax.” I was once proud that I got one up-vote, until I realized that you get one for making the original post.
The many names of Dave Ryder–and their unjustly overlooked precursors in 12 to the Moon–come in handy when you need to riff about someone who’s overdosed on testosterone: (eye-roll, then snide tone) “Hey, get a load of Chunk Manmusk over there …” Still a family favorite! I have found that, when used appropriately, these epithets are appreciated even by people who don’t really know MST3K. (Um, but not in direct address, of course …)
For me and my family, it’s more like, when are we NOT quoting MST? X^D
A riff from the Chicken of Tomorrow short might have been more fitting, though.
I definitely use “if you’re like me, and I know I am” and “I’m weird, which results in creativity” frequently. One that I have to refrain myself from using when saying goodbye to people is “stay pink, soft and oily” from Hired!
“Noo Lapida!”
This always gets WTF looks. Especially when I was working construction.
Unless of course…they’re one of US.
Whenever somebody around me says something particularly stupid or confusing, I can’t help but fire off a “‘The banjo becomes angry at midnight.’ WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”
I’ve been using “preeetttyy niiice” often lately.
Quick story: A year or so back my eldest son came home from a recording studio where he’d been with his band buddies working on some tracks and showed me a video they’d shot. He was noodling on his guitar and the guy shooting the videos asked “what do you think?”
He looked up at the camera and, with dead-on inflection and expression–and the accompanying “OK” sign–replied: “It Stinks!”
One of my proudest moments as a dad… ;)
These are definitely chickens of the very distant future.
OK, that was creepy.
I was just exchanging e-mails with someone and made reference to those crazy kids today, with their hula hoops and fax machines.
It didn’t even register until I closed the conversatio–HOW MANY MST CATCHPHRASES DO I USE AND DON’T EVEN REALIZE IT ANYMORE?
I find myself thinking/saying “What do you, the viewers at home think?” probably more often than is palpable to my partner / co-workers.
I also think “Dare I?” (a la Final Sacrifice) quite a bit lately.
Won’t you?
I often say “Oh, do you dare?” from Mr. B Natural, complete with Servo’s sarcastic tone, when someone mentions they’re about to do something simple or mundane. Peter Plum’s Drivers License: I know what you mean! MST catch phrases are so much a part of me now that I don’t even notice when I use ’em half the time!
I was in an office building one day and they were showing an art exhibit in the lobby. One of the paintings was of a lighthouse & I blurted out in a haunting tone “Tom Stewart killed me”. Let’s just say I got some odd looks from people.
And those that won’t, will soon be joining “Steak-milk” and “I’m a widdle baby”.
And their big pants, and their spiral notebooks, and their listening to the Paula Cole, and the pierced I-don’t-know-whats…
I dunno. I don’t think we’re gonna find out for years. I mean, I STILL don’t understand the lasting appeal of “Watch out for snakes!” twenty-five years after it first aired.
On the occasion of my third cup of fine Ethiopian cold-brewed coffee this morning, another one bobs up that I use all the time, WITHOUT ANY CONSCIOUSNESS OF IT BEING AN MST CATCHPHRASE: “Oh, is the great [insert a person’s name that a morally deficient person could characterize as self-importantly pompous] going to join us today?”
Whenever walking through fields/woods, etc., I always proclaim “watch out for snakes!” in a weird, off-camera-type voice.
I’ve also told people that I want to be mummified and placed next to Stalin.
Anytime I’m shown some new internet archive/reference material: “27 pages on Gwen Stefani alone!”
And only for close friends and family (who might not be as offended): when they say “I love you”, I respond “I’m sort of fond of you Servoooooo”.
Singing “sex for sundries is fun” apropos of nothing (because the situation has yet to arise when I can sing it literally–and hopefully it never will).
“I’ll blow her brains OUT–all over THE boat!” anytime a hostage situation arises on those TV procedurals my wife watches.
“You go for hyperspace, I’m bitter.” Works in a lot of places, actually.
And “nobody does; I’m the wind, baby!”, whenever anyone responds quizzically to the above catchphrases.
Oh this is easy: whenever I’m saying pretty much anything of relative importance to the kids (simple stuff really – “Hey, do the dishes..” or “You need to close the garage door when you come inside..” or “Your dinner is getting cold!”), I’ll turn to whomever is in the room (typically my long-suffering, lovely wife) and say “There. I said it, I’ll say it again if I have to.”
She only vaguely knows that it’s from that weird show I watch with the puppets.
Gare
This. I’ve tossed this out during confusing conversations. It sometimes elicits a laugh, or at leas some nervous titters. And women hate those.
Gare
It’s RiffTrax, but whenever I’m grocery shopping, and I decide to get a new product, or something is marked down for sale and I’m willing to give it a go:
“Hmm. Beard completer – worth a shot.”
I just consider myself lucky that so far no one has called the cops on me.
I have been known to use “Good one, Nelson!” whenever I notice myself or others doing a foolish something. Usually gets a look because they think that the guy is named Nelson and I know him well enough say this out loud.
That phrase at least has some significance to fans who watched the episode, in that the joke was over how bizarre the bad technical overdubbing came off, just like every other bit of low-rent technical in Arch Hall’s hopeful but very amateur movie.
It’s easier to explain why that one’s funny to a MSTie fan, than to explain why “Pret-ty niiice!” is rollicking hilarity just because Jonah&tB beat it into the ground Mike-style, thinking the actor said it sorta funny.
And would Pod People’s “It stinks!” or “Trumpy, you can do magic!” have ever caught on without their corresponding host segments?
“Steak-milk” was more the “Widdle-baby” example of S11-12 trying to force a gag, by piling on more and more riffs about that gag, whether it “took” with the audience or not. Similar to the tavern scene at the end of S12’s Ator, where it takes the patience of Job not to shout back “Use ‘Kellogg’s Corn Pops’ in a riff ONE MORE TIME, and I will shoot you in the face.”