It’s been said by Christopher Walken, 90s cartoons, and was a popular pull quote from 2004’s Ben Stiller comedy Dodgeball (the most famous iteration of the phrase) and up until around that time it remained funny and sharp, but that time period was its final act. Any utterance post 2007 is stale.
We can and should appreciate this history and not cast aspersions on it while we respectfully move on. Because let’s not forget – it *is* funny. It’s good imagery to express disgust in a variety of ways. I would like to honor it with a short documentary some day, even, and pay tribute to its history. But some points of history aren’t meant to keep rolling forever and that is especially true in comedy. It’s not that it’s a bad line – it’s just not fresh, and thus not clever, and thus should no longer be used.
But it is. A lot.
In fact, it’s so popular that in looking for that Dodgeball GIF, I found many variations of it that people made to mark other things they find irritating and repulsive enough to express in such a manner.
This shows that Dodgeball has captured the narrative of being the go-to citation for this phrase for civilians, which seems unfair since it was introduced in the 1990s. Where exactly, I can’t place, but I heard it on a cartoon or two, and I believe in an episode of Friends uttered by either Phoebe or Monica.
Wherever it came from, Dodgeball injected it into the mainstream and it has refused to die ever since.
Is it because it’s just too versatile to resist? Because the root concept of the phrase comes in many forms, which has contributed to its played out nature.
There’s the sarcastic question to use it as a way of saying “aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” –
A way of confessing that you are ashamed of yourself after something you just said –
The use of adding some variation of “a little” to the phrase is often key to the expression since it flavors the statement with some soft-sarcasm and humorous incongruity by condensing the typically violent act of vomiting into a casual oopsie.
Building on that aspect: a casual and unaffected use of the phrase diversifies the expression to include a condescending disdain rather than an assault to ones senses and sensibilities.
In fact, the more a person shows themselves as unaffected when using the phrase, the more disdainful the commentary it has-
Saying it sarcastically isn’t always an insult though. The sarcasm could portray an array of points that orbit around being grossed out but not-really-
It can even be used to signify a heightened disorientation brought on by an unexpected or unfamiliar situation-
But the core usage is a way to condemn something you just heard as being so repulsive that just as when something repugnant enters your mouth and causes an involuntary throw-up, even if just a little – what you just heard was so repugnant that even it entering your earhole caused that physical reaction.
This can be used as a scold in the vein of saying “look at what you just caused by that terrible behavior”-
It can be said in extreme deadpan to express how unamused a person is –
Or it can lean into itself and openly convey gross disgust-
But no matter what the usage – we should be done with it. The phrase had had an over 20 year run and it’s been used as far and wide as it can.
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