What's my line

I was watching “Today” the other day and the segment I caught was on men and lines from movies. It was the typical assault on men that post-World War II culture accepts (men are stupid, men are only sexual beings), but I was intrigued by another angle – that men can communicate much emotion and information with a line from a popular show or movie.

The females on the show just brushed this aside as men being stupid, but I disagree. The movies and some TV shows give all of us a common frame of reference. This is good. I use movie lines with people at work all the time and they’re a great way to break the ice, get a quick laugh or probe someone’s background so you know the boundaries that surround them.

What is bad is that "classic" literature is not universally recognized. I’m no Poindexter, but I figure I have some of the basics covered.

Here’s my test.

I will list some lines, paraphrases and scenes from movies, and I’ll bet you can recognize most of them (Depending on your age). Then, I will list some lines and scenes from what I consider to be baseline literature that I assume everyone knows, no matter how old they are. I’ll bet we all score lower here.

This is not to make anyone look uneducated. It’s just to show that we have strayed so far from common cultural references that all we have to unite us are fleeting lines from popular entertainment. And even those don’t cross age and cultural barriers.

TV and movies

-- Suicide is painless (MASH the movie)
-- You’ve thrown away your whole education (MASH the movie
-- So I got that going for me (Caddyshack)
-- It’s a Cinderella story (Caddyshack)
-- Take off, eh. (Strange Brew)
-- Frank Burns eats worms (MASH the TV show)
-- Ferrit face (MASH the TV show)
-- Rosebud (Citizen Cane)
-- This could be the start of a beautiful friendship (Casablanca)
-- Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me? (The Graduate)
-- Vote for Pedro (Napoleon Dynamite)
-- Sorry your mom blew up, Ricky (Better Off Dead)
-- He’s a very clean man (Hard Day’s Night)
-- Surely, you jest? Stop calling me Shirley (Airplane!)
-- Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges (Blazing Saddles)
-- What knockers! Oh, thank you, doctor (Young Frankenstein)
-- An African or European swallow? (Monty Python’s Holy Grail)
-- Go ahead, make my day (Sudden Impact)
-- A three hour tour (Gilligan’s Island)
-- There’s no place like home (Wizard of Oz)
-- Beam me up, Scotty (Star Trek)
-- What’s up, Doc? (Bugs Bunny)

I could go on for pages on these, but you get the point.

Th written word

Now try these -- and remember the author!

-- Therein lies the rub (slight misquote of Hamlet, William Shakespeare)
-- Mr. Kurtz, he dead (Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad)
-- Please, sir. May I have some more? (Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens)
-- It was the best of times, it was the worst of times (Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens)
-- Who is John Galt? (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand)
-- All Gaul is divided into three parts (Commentaries, Julius Caesar)
-- Down the ringing grooves of change (Locksley Hall, Alfred Tennyson)
-- A specter is haunting Europe (Communist Manifesto, Marx)
-- What is to be done? (Lenin)
-- ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves (Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll)
-- Things fall apart (The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats; or Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe)
-- That in all your amours, you should prefer old women to young ones (Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress, Ben Franklin)
-- These are the times that try men's souls (Common Sense, Thomas Payne)

I've left off a lot, but this list took twice as long to compile as the first one.

Thought: Boy, did I waste a lot of time on this.