i feel "that's the beauty of it..." is just another iteration of the very common trope of *absurd or comedic answer to a genuine inquiry* "That's the secret, Cap. I'm always angry", "How do i breathe in... space?/That's the neat thing, you don't" "when do they start tuning their instruments and playing the music?/That IS the music!"
Honestly, I think it's this: the cadence/rhythm of the exchange is familiar, and the type of joke (Genuine Question responded to with anticlimactic/absurd comedic answer) is so common in at least English-language media (maybe in other languages, too, but I can't speak to that) that any joke or exchange following that pattern feels familiar.
Your answer is exactly what I was thinking. I couldn't remember ever having heard the quote, but I definitely remembered hearing similar things. I think this is just one of those tropes that humans find funny, just like how the fundamentals of Ancient Greek comedies still work today .
OHHH so you started on college radio! That makes so much sense for this content that feels like a mix between a school broadcast and an educational/speculative podcast. Cool video, deserves more attention tbh 📺
I personally don't have the memory for quotes, but I think it's possible that the general sentiment of the quote has been floating around the public consciousness for thousands of years or something. Who knows, maybe we will find some ancient mesopotamian tablet that translates to the quote and that will suffice as a good enough answer.
@@Joe-sg9ll wait what? Actually? Honest to gods I remember that 'you want to know how I got here's from an animal movie or somethings and I'm pretty sure some books. Do books count?
This is actually one of the most likely if you ask me. Perfectly in the tone of the show, influenced many writers and actors, impossible to verify. It's even a very whovian fate for the quote: Lost to time, scarcely remembered, but felt everywhere.
Is this the power of suggestion? You ask if someone's heard a quote before, and even if they haven't, they think of where they may have heard something similar and attribute it to whatever the first thing that comes to their mind is.
For me this seems like a similar case to the quote "Elementary, my dear Watson" which is often attributed to Sherlock Holmes despite the fact that he never says that specific quote in any Conan Doyle text, BUT he does say "Elementary" a lot and often refers to his partner as "my dear Watson". Likewise I think "That's the beauty of it!" is a very common response that you can find in many dialogues, and the same goes for "It doesn't do it anything" as a response to someone asking what something does. But putting those two quotes together might be where people are misremembering. They might just be thinking of the quotes separately and imagining there's some scene in which they are said together
That second Simpsons white you showed is 100% definitely what I was thinking of when you said that quote. My brain immediately went to Simpsons when I heard the quote, and I am pretty damn sure that quote is what I was actually thinking of.
I thought Eraserhead....then realized I was remembering the dad talking about the "chickens" they were eating and he just said "They're new!" and that has ZERO to do with this quote so I think it's a weird connection my brain made that I don't understand and maybe that is something similar to this. I am leaning toward the concept that a. asking someone if they remember a quote naturally makes them think about it and think they have heard it and b. the two separate phrases together makes one think they remember it as a whole phrase. This is my new favorite channel! Thank u Tor!
To me it seems like just the very boiled-down essence (hence its memetic potential) of an interaction between two archetypical characters: the tinkerer, who wants to understand the function of and reasoning behind something; and the marketer, who is interested more in perception, manipulation, and finding a way to make a quick buck. And how the two are fundamentally at odds. "That's the beauty of it" sums up this conflict -- to the asker, the fact that it doesn't actually have a function is likely a bug, not a feature! That's my interpretation of it, anyway...as someone who, upon hearing it instantly recognized its familiarity but nevertheless hadn't the faintest inkling of a source where I might have heard it (and my memory is typically excellent)
I feel like I have a good memory for quotes but I can confidently say I've never heard this phrase before. Think you may have berenstained a reality where this phrase is more common than you think
Honestly i dont remember hearing it. I remember reading it. I used to be really into sherlock holmes as a young adult and i remember "What does it do?" "Well thats the beauty of it Watson, it doesnt do anything" but i couldnt even begin to tell you which story.
My first instinct is Futurama, that it's from the Apple parody, but I don't think that's right. Failing that, my shot-in-the-dark guess is it's from some sort of Monty Python sketch or other british comedy, since it has that vibe-- my brain is telling me it's the punchline after a long sales pitch that's 100% marketing fluff, describing how something is sleek and modern and an excellent price etc. etc. After watching the video further and contemplating more it seems to me it should be the punchline to a long-winded sales pitch where the salesman is enthusing over how the product doesn't need various things like maintenance, electricity, gas, oil, no muss, no fuss, guaranteed warranty absolutely free, etc. and either a buyer is taken in by the pitch and buys it and a sidekick then asks "... what does it do?" or a potential buyer asks, and yields more or less the given reply. I feel the original quote must come from literature- I looked and found many attestations of various kinds of "nothing" being the beauty of something, like something costing nothing or requiring nothing, so surely something *doing* nothing must be a satire of this. Ok so Phineas and Ferb definitely influenced my belief that it must be based on a sales pitch. Though in the Phineas and Ferb clip, it's actually a fitting joke since it ties in with the running joke of them describing Perry by saying "he's a platypus, they don't do much"- so it's entirely possible that it wasn't even a reference to the mystery since I could absolutely conceive of a comedy writer coming up with that joke independently in the context.
One of the vignettes in the book "Psychopaths" (1971) by Alan Harrington concerns a type A CEO business man who keeps a Rube Goldberg type contraption in his office. An associate is admiring the machine and asks him what it does. His reply is that the machine does nothing.
Another place that might've clipped this (Burke's law) and used it enough for it to be remembered widely but not specifically enough to be saved is a horror movie host like Svengoolie that got national syndication. There were/are nationally syndicated radio shows too, not impossible for that to be a source of spread
Wow... I was thinking about how I first heard about it in that thread on the Straight Dope message boards, and did NOT expect it to get directly brought up in the video.
the Magic: the Gathering card "Null Rod" has flavor text that has a similar exchange to this quote, but it's not quite the same and has different implications related to what the card does
Reminds me of how pet rocks were a thing, but my recollection also points vaguely to a show or movie snippet where a guy was explaining their pet something... but I don't usually remember show names lol edit: yeah definitely wasn't thinking 60's cop show
Never heard the quote before this, but it made me think of the flavor text of the mtg card Null Rod. "Gerrard: It doesn't do anything! Hanna: No, it does nothing." In context of the card's effect, making other artifacts/machines stop functioning, there is an understanding that doing nothing is what makes the artifact valuable, or as the quote says, that's the beauty of it. Card released in 1997.
There is this sort of a priori assumption that this is a quote rather than a cliche reinvented every time it is used in a stock scenario where we see a machine that does nothing, which is a cliche itself in the form of a Rube Goldberg contraption.
The quote reminds me of two works, even though the quote itself does not appear in them. The first thing that comes to mind is the song Stroj na nic by the Czechoslovak rock band Blue Effect, which is about a commercial presentation of a useless machine. The second thing that comes to mind is Franz Kafka's short story In the Penal Colony, in which a military officer describes a killing machine with needles. The officer revels in the functioning of the machine, even though the machine is unnecessarily complex (it also eventually malfunctions).
Great video! This is such a fascinating topic. My dad used to say this quote all the time, which makes me think most young people know it through cultural osmosis.
I was a boyscout growing up and my troop had a binder with all of the campfire skits that my troop had used going back at least a decade and that quote word for word was a campfire skit
I think the Hudsucker Proxy must be a riff on it - because the answer is "ya know, for kids!" without implying that it doesn't do anything - but the interaction ends up having about the same meaning.
I feel like the quote is vague enough with a tinge of humour that it's probably been independently brought into existence way before anyone even dreamed of Internet, or TV. Someone's probably said it jokingly in, say, 1756 or thereabouts. (Scrolling down the comments now, seems like a lot of people agree). Another thing about the Mandela effect: "Sex and the City" is, sometimes, actually "Sex in the City", if you count localizations. I know it certainly is in Polish, which happens to be my first language. It does indeed make more sense that way. Also English has enough different accents and dialects that I'd bet there's people out there who pronounce the bears' name one way or another on account of that. Tbh in light of all this, I find the Cool S the coolest "mystery" of them all. That's a lot of small, very specific steps you have to take to create the Cool S shape, you know.
Null Rod, a magic card released in 1997 has a similar quote (Gerrard: "But it doesn't do anything!" Hanna: "No-it does nothing."). I assumed it was a reference to a previous quote from somewhere else!
A DVD re-release of "Who K*lled the Richest Man in the World?" might sell pretty briskly, right about now. Also, there must be innumerable alternate universes where the machine actually DOES do something - universes where Tor's Cabinet would consequently never have been built. This universe may very well be a rare hybrid of the two basic forms, given that Tor keeps gradually disappearing into the floor during significant passages in the narrative.
The radio station sounds extremely familiar to me. I wasn't too far from chicago as a kid, and we did get syndicated shows on those stations. Flashback Friday with Nina Blackwood is an example.
feels like Futurama but for all i know i could have encountered in smth older. Douglas Adams, Pratchett books, idk. not really sure for any of em. also would not be surprised if you just made up a quote to test false memories, or you actually spotted a false memory
there is a south brazilian author and poet called Paulo Leminski who once in an essay refered to poetry as an "inutensílio", portuguese portmanteau of 'useless' + 'utensil'; it is made and cherished precisely because it does not serve any pratical purpose. so he basically said that poetry doesnt do anything and that is the beauty of it. i doubt that is the source, but the sentiment was there
this quote is very interesting bcuz i personally could've sworn i've heard it b4 (my personal source media was citizen kane, 4 some reason)- but here's the catch... i'm not a native english speaker. this is not a thing i could've grown up w/. n yet it just sounds right? somehow?
My immediate memory of the quote is from 30 Rock, but even its (many) uses and variations in that show already feel like a reference to something else so I'm stumped. Though it does seem like it might have been a classic in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon age, possibly from the Jetsons or the Flintstones.
So i collect Victorian era books. Literally could have sworn i saw it or something with incredibly similar verbage in an obscure sea faringd novel, that was so uninteresting i put it down and decided against buying it. It was about a trinket one of the sailors had that wasnt tied to any superstition like the other things he said/did. Book looked like it was late 1870s to mid 1880s based on the binding (swirly looking board, blue cotton binding, lack of print date or copyright) and for the life of me i cant remember it, and its irking me, because it may not be the origin of the phrase, but it might be an earlier example of it. Now im having regret for not picking it up, simply for the novelty of the quote. Might have to drive out and see if the shop still has it.
at the beginning of this video, I couldn't think of anything I thought the quote was from when you asked, it sounded vaguely like it could be familiar but not like I'd definitely heard it before. In fact, my first thought was kind of "it sounds like something my dad would say, imitating a stereotypical eccentric character, like an old fashioned meme" and I figured I'd just heard it through general cultural transmission rather than a direct source. So I guess in the end, maybe I'm really kind right? though funnily enough, this happens to me with a lot of stuff that I assume is just a meme or common idiom, but then it turns out it's a direct quote from some famous piece of media I've never seen/heard like Jurassic Park or Friends or a pop song or something. It's crazy how much culture you can absorb from osmosis, as someone who famously consumes virtually no modern pop cultural media (I mostly just watch sports and listen to trad folk music) I can attest to this
Just a guess, but has anyone read through every "BC" comic strip up to 2003? The quote sounds like something that could be in one, and BC's writer (Johnny Hart, I think) is the type who might have seen the Burke's Law episode and found it amusing to appropriate the phrase. Then the strip could have been clipped out and taped to refrigerator doors and office bulletin boards until it turned yellow and fell off, returning the quote to the ether...
27:47 and about that s thing, i always assumed that it was just something that is easy to draw inside the square pattern on the pages of school notebooks on a boring math lesson. You just connect the lines in a geometric pattern like a braid of sorts and you get this s. It only becomes the s of you dont draw this oatern further than 2 segments. Kids in my class were drawing these "braids" in the notebooks all day and the rusdian alphabet doesn't even have this "S" letter. We called them braids, but it was the sane pattern, its just no one really cut it down to two segments to form an "s" because rusdian doesn't have a letter like that so it wasnt the first association for most of us.
this reminds me a lot of the ask metafilter thread trying to find a specific sequence in a sitcom intro. post titled, “Which TV show intro was this?!” with this as the question: “Okay, so... it was a TV show in the US, in the '80s or early '90s. I'm fairly certain it was a sitcom. During the intro/ opening credits, there's a bit where one character is painting a wall or a door, and another character opens the door, and the first character rolls the paint roller over the other person's face. I can see this in my mind, but I cannot for the life of me figure out the show it came from.” this thread went on for years and spread to a lot of different places.
I felt the familiarity when i first heard the quote, but after watching the Phineas and Ferb clip, i think that’s where it originated for me. I grew up watching the show and remember that particular episode from my childhood. I know it’s probably not the universal answer, but it explained it for me personally
Although not an exact quote, 1971 Hungarian movie "Hahó, a tenger" contains a very similar scene: "Öcsi", the film's main character, observes his father build a strange rotating contraption. He asks (in Hungarian), "But Dad, what's it good for?" to which his father replies, "I think it's good for... Nothing." The scene ends with the two frantically chanting "Good for nothing", while circling the device. Apparently "Hahó, a tenger" had an obscure Western release under the title "Junior Jr. comes" - perhaps the quote came from an English dub of this scene for that release?
I think it’s a quote that never really had an origin. It’s just a Frankenstein of similar quotes/ideas that casts a very wide net because, hey! Who can’t relate to liking something that does… nothing. It’s a very relatable idea. Some people collect rocks for god’s sake… they don’t do anything, they just look pretty. Besides, posing the question as “have you heard this quote before? Thousands of people think they have!” Is a very good way to appeal to the human desire to be part of the “in-group.” “Oh, a bunch of people have heard this quote and are searching for it? Well, I wanna be one of those cool people! Maybe I *have* heard the quote before!” It’s just a vaguely relatable idea that sounds quotable even if there is nowhere the quote originates from
Ah, I was right that it was familiar because it was like a simpons quote but not quite, I wouldn't say I'd heard it even then, just that it sounds like a very typical joke that immediately feels familiar. Just because it's. Prototypical. But very annoying have to yell 30 rock at my phone 10 times. 😅
Thought seeing it quote-of-the-day'd gives me another theory: Someone saw an obscure old tv show, liked the quote and made it their forum signature, re-pithysized into a 2 line structure, with quote marks but sans attribution. On a big forum where they were a big poster, people saw it every day but never asked where the quuote is from. And now, veteran nerds who forgot people even used to PUT quotes in forum signatures recognise it but have no memor of where from. Their minds ear provides each with different plausible voicing based on media they know with characters they recognise making them feel like they heard it, but they only ever read it, in forum signaures DESIGND to go conciously unnoticed.
Crucially, when people change their forum signatures, it updates their signature on old posts, so it would only be in archives, and if a forum isn't open without even a free account, it won't be archived. So you couldn't track this origin down.
I think it's from Friends. It sounds like a conversation Joey and Chandler had. But after seeing the 30 rock clip I'm not sure I've seen that episode a million times so that could've been it
My guess, 2 months late, is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I barely remember that movie, but I know there was an eccentric inventor character who would say something like that
I swear it’s from Futurama. That could also be the crazy inventor trope being made fun of from the old cop show. Futurama came out in 1999, so it could have been said a few years before the first post online about it.
My first thought was futurama. Seems like it would be an exchange between Leela and Professor Farnsworth. But i dont think i have ever actually heard that exact quote, just similar ones
I was thinking the other day about emergent phenomenon like this. like how every dan i have ever met is nicknamed handsome dan at some point. or every jeremy nicknamed jerbear.
I have never heard those nicknames in my life. Might've heard handsome Dan once or twice, but there's no particular instance that I can recall. I've known many Dans and Jeremys and none of them had those nicknames.
I may be 2 months late, but I have faint memories of this being from The Simpsons or something. I would have had to have learned it from memes or something. Maybe also Phineas and Ferb or some other children's tv show that is actually good? It's tickling my brain. Yep, I definitely first heard it on P&F, and probably got sent a reaction gif of it at some point.
At first I thought, "this must be a trick because you would never give away your precious Jolibee, and I know that you got it in a one-off purchase from a confused street vendor. So it's not like you got a hundred of these in a back room somewhere." And then I thought, "that quote sounds like 'Brazil'... No wait, that isn't right, that's the one where product confusion is answered with 'it's for kids'. " So I got nothing, but I'm also entering the rest of the video wary of potential shenanigans. 👀
Got my mind set off on what the subject of the quote is. Is it a pointless machine? A book? A pet rock? I feel like if it has an origin then it's something classical like Alice in Wonderland or CS Lewis. Then again it could equally be from a comedy musical from the golden era of them. Or from the original Police Squad series.
It sounds like some of the shtik Harvey Korman does in The Star Wars Holiday Special. That makes me think it might be an old joke told at Catskill resorts by comedians. Think New York Friars Club members in the 1950’s who all steal each other’s jokes.
I was thinking along the same lines. To me it sounded like something Morey Amsterdam would say on the old Dick Van Dyke show. Maybe it's a classic vaudeville punchline or something
I'd guess l have heard it on Home Improvement or some family sitcom, like Love and Marriage. But that is really just the limitations of media ive absorbed in my lifetime, and well my memory. However I think the quote would predate those. And the "cool S" I can't nail down the context, but I personally believe it could be from some "Magic Tricks and practical Illusions" or related topic book from the 70s/80s, I can't google find the one I had, but it was like 100 experiments and just random cool things, involving household objects and miscellaneity
I think I first heard it on _Phineas and Ferb,_ but I can't be sure. If so, I think it was the episode where they made a wooden block toy out of Perry. EDIT: Well, that wasn't the origin, but I got the episode of the reference right! Go me!
I know I've seen it referenced in memes but can't say where it's from. It has the feeling of a print cartoon, something like Far Side, but I don't think that's where its from
Can't say I've ever heard the quote outside of Lemon Demon but I also have had cable for a negligible percentage of my life so maybe I've just been living under a rock
The sex in the city part is true in the russian translation, lol, it really was translated with that meaning, so maybe some of those who remember it that way are bilinguals who saw it first in some other language and later translated the mistranslation back to english in their heads
Okay, first, the kook who says the line in Burke's Law is played by Burgess Meredith, who was already a respected character actor and would go on to appear as the original Penguin on Batman and in an iconic episode of The Twilight Zone. Personally, I think the rhythm of the joke sounds like Vaudeville banter. Early cartoons often recycled old bits from Vaudeville and minstrel shows. Those cartoons were aired on TV steadily throughout the 1950's into the 1980's. But, those cartoons were also full of racist stereotypes and by the 90's when Cartoon Network acquired the rights to most of that media they started censoring out the most offensive content. So, as a result, there is a considerable body of old media half-remembered by Boomers and Gen Xers that has since been lost. I suspect one of those old movies or cartoons could be the original source of the joke.
It's certainly a quote that sticks with you, but not too well--something that sounds like something you've heard before, a clever little joke, a brief little smile in your mind. It sounds like something that could have come from a thing you like, whatever that thing might've been... But not something so profound as to be remembered distinctly. My relatively mundane theory is that it did come from something specific, either Burke's law or something that influenced it, and it happened to worm its way into someone's brain until they remembered it, years later, and started asking about it. It works its way in and out of scripts and books for years until the internet comes along and people can start puzzling over it far more publicly than ever before, everyone certain it came from somewhere specific but none remembering exactly where from, since none really remember the exact phrase anyway. Oh, and where I'm from, we called that S the "Super S". Maybe it's my personal bias but I think that's a better/cooler name than "Cool S".
I want to say i remember an interaction between word girl and mr bigs that’s along the same lines but I’m certain ive heard this quote somewhere else too
3:45 I literally may have known it from burke’s law lmao my grandma loved old trash tv like this, don’t remember this one in particular but then I was focused on my arts and crafts not grandmas shows
before watching: i dont think i can firmly think of ANY media with that as a solid quote. its more like a trope than a QUOTE idk... hellsing?? does that movie even have that quote...?
thank you paul dano you have my like
i feel "that's the beauty of it..." is just another iteration of the very common trope of *absurd or comedic answer to a genuine inquiry*
"That's the secret, Cap. I'm always angry", "How do i breathe in... space?/That's the neat thing, you don't" "when do they start tuning their instruments and playing the music?/That IS the music!"
Honestly, I think it's this: the cadence/rhythm of the exchange is familiar, and the type of joke (Genuine Question responded to with anticlimactic/absurd comedic answer) is so common in at least English-language media (maybe in other languages, too, but I can't speak to that) that any joke or exchange following that pattern feels familiar.
Your answer is exactly what I was thinking. I couldn't remember ever having heard the quote, but I definitely remembered hearing similar things. I think this is just one of those tropes that humans find funny, just like how the fundamentals of Ancient Greek comedies still work today .
..I.. I’ve never heard this quote before 😭
OHHH so you started on college radio! That makes so much sense for this content that feels like a mix between a school broadcast and an educational/speculative podcast. Cool video, deserves more attention tbh 📺
I personally don't have the memory for quotes, but I think it's possible that the general sentiment of the quote has been floating around the public consciousness for thousands of years or something. Who knows, maybe we will find some ancient mesopotamian tablet that translates to the quote and that will suffice as a good enough answer.
@@Joe-sg9ll wait what? Actually? Honest to gods I remember that 'you want to know how I got here's from an animal movie or somethings and I'm pretty sure some books. Do books count?
My money is on it being from one of Dr. Who’s infamous missing episodes that got erased by the BBC to reuse the tapes
Yeah
Oh… THAT WOULD BE SO ANNOYING
This is actually one of the most likely if you ask me. Perfectly in the tone of the show, influenced many writers and actors, impossible to verify. It's even a very whovian fate for the quote: Lost to time, scarcely remembered, but felt everywhere.
"Exactly what is on this video tape?"
"That's the beauty of it! It no longer contains anything!"
Is this the power of suggestion? You ask if someone's heard a quote before, and even if they haven't, they think of where they may have heard something similar and attribute it to whatever the first thing that comes to their mind is.
For me this seems like a similar case to the quote "Elementary, my dear Watson" which is often attributed to Sherlock Holmes despite the fact that he never says that specific quote in any Conan Doyle text, BUT he does say "Elementary" a lot and often refers to his partner as "my dear Watson". Likewise I think "That's the beauty of it!" is a very common response that you can find in many dialogues, and the same goes for "It doesn't do it anything" as a response to someone asking what something does. But putting those two quotes together might be where people are misremembering. They might just be thinking of the quotes separately and imagining there's some scene in which they are said together
That second Simpsons white you showed is 100% definitely what I was thinking of when you said that quote. My brain immediately went to Simpsons when I heard the quote, and I am pretty damn sure that quote is what I was actually thinking of.
My immediate thought is Seinfeld. Feels like a George Constanza bit.
Even the whole bit about the show being about nothing gives the same vibe as the quote as well
this is honestly the best channel i've come across this year
I thought Eraserhead....then realized I was remembering the dad talking about the "chickens" they were eating and he just said "They're new!" and that has ZERO to do with this quote so I think it's a weird connection my brain made that I don't understand and maybe that is something similar to this. I am leaning toward the concept that a. asking someone if they remember a quote naturally makes them think about it and think they have heard it and b. the two separate phrases together makes one think they remember it as a whole phrase. This is my new favorite channel! Thank u Tor!
To me it seems like just the very boiled-down essence (hence its memetic potential) of an interaction between two archetypical characters: the tinkerer, who wants to understand the function of and reasoning behind something; and the marketer, who is interested more in perception, manipulation, and finding a way to make a quick buck. And how the two are fundamentally at odds. "That's the beauty of it" sums up this conflict -- to the asker, the fact that it doesn't actually have a function is likely a bug, not a feature!
That's my interpretation of it, anyway...as someone who, upon hearing it instantly recognized its familiarity but nevertheless hadn't the faintest inkling of a source where I might have heard it (and my memory is typically excellent)
It’s from Shazam.
Brilliant! The effort that you put into this is clear and demonstrates your passion for your work!
I feel like I have a good memory for quotes but I can confidently say I've never heard this phrase before. Think you may have berenstained a reality where this phrase is more common than you think
Nah I most definitely heard it. I thought it was from Seinfield. Maybe it’s an age thing? I’m 32.
Same. This didn't click as a quote I'd ever heard, and I'm from the 80s. Maybe this is a younger generation thing? Even if it's from a boomer show?
Honestly i dont remember hearing it. I remember reading it. I used to be really into sherlock holmes as a young adult and i remember "What does it do?" "Well thats the beauty of it Watson, it doesnt do anything" but i couldnt even begin to tell you which story.
My first instinct is Futurama, that it's from the Apple parody, but I don't think that's right. Failing that, my shot-in-the-dark guess is it's from some sort of Monty Python sketch or other british comedy, since it has that vibe-- my brain is telling me it's the punchline after a long sales pitch that's 100% marketing fluff, describing how something is sleek and modern and an excellent price etc. etc.
After watching the video further and contemplating more it seems to me it should be the punchline to a long-winded sales pitch where the salesman is enthusing over how the product doesn't need various things like maintenance, electricity, gas, oil, no muss, no fuss, guaranteed warranty absolutely free, etc. and either a buyer is taken in by the pitch and buys it and a sidekick then asks "... what does it do?" or a potential buyer asks, and yields more or less the given reply. I feel the original quote must come from literature- I looked and found many attestations of various kinds of "nothing" being the beauty of something, like something costing nothing or requiring nothing, so surely something *doing* nothing must be a satire of this.
Ok so Phineas and Ferb definitely influenced my belief that it must be based on a sales pitch. Though in the Phineas and Ferb clip, it's actually a fitting joke since it ties in with the running joke of them describing Perry by saying "he's a platypus, they don't do much"- so it's entirely possible that it wasn't even a reference to the mystery since I could absolutely conceive of a comedy writer coming up with that joke independently in the context.
I thought the same thing about Futurama. It’s just old enough and I could totally see Professor saying that.
Sounds like Oscar Wilde. Maybe from The Importance of Being Earnest or The Picture of Dorian Gray?
One of the vignettes in the book "Psychopaths" (1971) by Alan Harrington concerns a type A CEO business man who keeps a Rube Goldberg type contraption in his office. An associate is admiring the machine and asks him what it does. His reply is that the machine does nothing.
Excellent improvement in your mic set up since I last watched.
Another place that might've clipped this (Burke's law) and used it enough for it to be remembered widely but not specifically enough to be saved is a horror movie host like Svengoolie that got national syndication. There were/are nationally syndicated radio shows too, not impossible for that to be a source of spread
I like at the end when he drinks the water like a gerbil
Wow... I was thinking about how I first heard about it in that thread on the Straight Dope message boards, and did NOT expect it to get directly brought up in the video.
the Magic: the Gathering card "Null Rod" has flavor text that has a similar exchange to this quote, but it's not quite the same and has different implications related to what the card does
Reminds me of how pet rocks were a thing, but my recollection also points vaguely to a show or movie snippet where a guy was explaining their pet something... but I don't usually remember show names lol
edit: yeah definitely wasn't thinking 60's cop show
Never heard the quote before this, but it made me think of the flavor text of the mtg card Null Rod. "Gerrard: It doesn't do anything! Hanna: No, it does nothing." In context of the card's effect, making other artifacts/machines stop functioning, there is an understanding that doing nothing is what makes the artifact valuable, or as the quote says, that's the beauty of it. Card released in 1997.
There is this sort of a priori assumption that this is a quote rather than a cliche reinvented every time it is used in a stock scenario where we see a machine that does nothing, which is a cliche itself in the form of a Rube Goldberg contraption.
Except that every Rube Goldberg contraption does something.
In halt and catch fire a character holds a piece of a concrete from a dam and says "It is what it does" remarking of the beautiful simplicity of it.
Never seen Burke's Law but I've seen that clip.
I'd look into Robin Williams for how it got into the collective consciousness.
The quote reminds me of two works, even though the quote itself does not appear in them. The first thing that comes to mind is the song Stroj na nic by the Czechoslovak rock band Blue Effect, which is about a commercial presentation of a useless machine. The second thing that comes to mind is Franz Kafka's short story In the Penal Colony, in which a military officer describes a killing machine with needles. The officer revels in the functioning of the machine, even though the machine is unnecessarily complex (it also eventually malfunctions).
Great video! This is such a fascinating topic. My dad used to say this quote all the time, which makes me think most young people know it through cultural osmosis.
I unfortunately have never heard that quote before, this is going to be a ride
Here at the start of the video, I can imagine this quote being from Seinfeld, Anchorman, and an episode of the show Word Girl on PBS
I was a boyscout growing up and my troop had a binder with all of the campfire skits that my troop had used going back at least a decade and that quote word for word was a campfire skit
I think the Hudsucker Proxy must be a riff on it - because the answer is "ya know, for kids!" without implying that it doesn't do anything - but the interaction ends up having about the same meaning.
I feel like the quote is vague enough with a tinge of humour that it's probably been independently brought into existence way before anyone even dreamed of Internet, or TV. Someone's probably said it jokingly in, say, 1756 or thereabouts. (Scrolling down the comments now, seems like a lot of people agree).
Another thing about the Mandela effect: "Sex and the City" is, sometimes, actually "Sex in the City", if you count localizations. I know it certainly is in Polish, which happens to be my first language. It does indeed make more sense that way. Also English has enough different accents and dialects that I'd bet there's people out there who pronounce the bears' name one way or another on account of that. Tbh in light of all this, I find the Cool S the coolest "mystery" of them all. That's a lot of small, very specific steps you have to take to create the Cool S shape, you know.
Monty Python Vibes. Probably even older though.
Null Rod, a magic card released in 1997 has a similar quote (Gerrard: "But it doesn't do anything!" Hanna: "No-it does nothing."). I assumed it was a reference to a previous quote from somewhere else!
A DVD re-release of "Who K*lled the Richest Man in the World?" might sell pretty briskly, right about now. Also, there must be innumerable alternate universes where the machine actually DOES do something - universes where Tor's Cabinet would consequently never have been built. This universe may very well be a rare hybrid of the two basic forms, given that Tor keeps gradually disappearing into the floor during significant passages in the narrative.
GenX here, & no, that quote isn’t familiar. ..I have a PhD in useless trivia and irrelevant information.
“how did you feel?” “i didnt feel anything”
The radio station sounds extremely familiar to me. I wasn't too far from chicago as a kid, and we did get syndicated shows on those stations. Flashback Friday with Nina Blackwood is an example.
feels like Futurama but for all i know i could have encountered in smth older. Douglas Adams, Pratchett books, idk. not really sure for any of em. also would not be surprised if you just made up a quote to test false memories, or you actually spotted a false memory
there is a south brazilian author and poet called Paulo Leminski who once in an essay refered to poetry as an "inutensílio", portuguese portmanteau of 'useless' + 'utensil'; it is made and cherished precisely because it does not serve any pratical purpose. so he basically said that poetry doesnt do anything and that is the beauty of it. i doubt that is the source, but the sentiment was there
this quote is very interesting bcuz i personally could've sworn i've heard it b4 (my personal source media was citizen kane, 4 some reason)- but here's the catch... i'm not a native english speaker. this is not a thing i could've grown up w/. n yet it just sounds right? somehow?
My immediate memory of the quote is from 30 Rock, but even its (many) uses and variations in that show already feel like a reference to something else so I'm stumped. Though it does seem like it might have been a classic in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon age, possibly from the Jetsons or the Flintstones.
So i collect Victorian era books. Literally could have sworn i saw it or something with incredibly similar verbage in an obscure sea faringd novel, that was so uninteresting i put it down and decided against buying it. It was about a trinket one of the sailors had that wasnt tied to any superstition like the other things he said/did. Book looked like it was late 1870s to mid 1880s based on the binding (swirly looking board, blue cotton binding, lack of print date or copyright) and for the life of me i cant remember it, and its irking me, because it may not be the origin of the phrase, but it might be an earlier example of it. Now im having regret for not picking it up, simply for the novelty of the quote. Might have to drive out and see if the shop still has it.
Sounds like the kind of thing The Doctor (Dr Who) would say. Maybe its on one of those missing episodes?
at the beginning of this video, I couldn't think of anything I thought the quote was from when you asked, it sounded vaguely like it could be familiar but not like I'd definitely heard it before. In fact, my first thought was kind of "it sounds like something my dad would say, imitating a stereotypical eccentric character, like an old fashioned meme" and I figured I'd just heard it through general cultural transmission rather than a direct source. So I guess in the end, maybe I'm really kind right?
though funnily enough, this happens to me with a lot of stuff that I assume is just a meme or common idiom, but then it turns out it's a direct quote from some famous piece of media I've never seen/heard like Jurassic Park or Friends or a pop song or something. It's crazy how much culture you can absorb from osmosis, as someone who famously consumes virtually no modern pop cultural media (I mostly just watch sports and listen to trad folk music) I can attest to this
You are are famous for this, even in Oregon.
Just a guess, but has anyone read through every "BC" comic strip up to 2003? The quote sounds like something that could be in one, and BC's writer (Johnny Hart, I think) is the type who might have seen the Burke's Law episode and found it amusing to appropriate the phrase. Then the strip could have been clipped out and taped to refrigerator doors and office bulletin boards until it turned yellow and fell off, returning the quote to the ether...
27:47 and about that s thing, i always assumed that it was just something that is easy to draw inside the square pattern on the pages of school notebooks on a boring math lesson. You just connect the lines in a geometric pattern like a braid of sorts and you get this s. It only becomes the s of you dont draw this oatern further than 2 segments. Kids in my class were drawing these "braids" in the notebooks all day and the rusdian alphabet doesn't even have this "S" letter. We called them braids, but it was the sane pattern, its just no one really cut it down to two segments to form an "s" because rusdian doesn't have a letter like that so it wasnt the first association for most of us.
The only place I've heard that is from Lemon Demon's "The Machine". I always imagined it was a sample from the Twilight Zone or something
Oh oops lol I just heard you say we're not allowed to say Lemon Demon
this reminds me a lot of the ask metafilter thread trying to find a specific sequence in a sitcom intro. post titled, “Which TV show intro was this?!” with this as the question:
“Okay, so... it was a TV show in the US, in the '80s or early '90s. I'm fairly certain it was a sitcom. During the intro/ opening credits, there's a bit where one character is painting a wall or a door, and another character opens the door, and the first character rolls the paint roller over the other person's face. I can see this in my mind, but I cannot for the life of me figure out the show it came from.”
this thread went on for years and spread to a lot of different places.
I felt the familiarity when i first heard the quote, but after watching the Phineas and Ferb clip, i think that’s where it originated for me. I grew up watching the show and remember that particular episode from my childhood. I know it’s probably not the universal answer, but it explained it for me personally
"sorry pengyoumen" took me out
Although not an exact quote, 1971 Hungarian movie "Hahó, a tenger" contains a very similar scene: "Öcsi", the film's main character, observes his father build a strange rotating contraption. He asks (in Hungarian), "But Dad, what's it good for?" to which his father replies, "I think it's good for... Nothing." The scene ends with the two frantically chanting "Good for nothing", while circling the device.
Apparently "Hahó, a tenger" had an obscure Western release under the title "Junior Jr. comes" - perhaps the quote came from an English dub of this scene for that release?
sounds like a Simpsons quote, but knowing them they prob just referenced it and now all I remember is them saying it lol
1:00 Absolute mind-read I thought of that immediately
this has a phineas and ferb vibe to it but i fully accept im probably wrong
what do you know? im not special at all!
I think it’s a quote that never really had an origin. It’s just a Frankenstein of similar quotes/ideas that casts a very wide net because, hey! Who can’t relate to liking something that does… nothing. It’s a very relatable idea. Some people collect rocks for god’s sake… they don’t do anything, they just look pretty.
Besides, posing the question as “have you heard this quote before? Thousands of people think they have!” Is a very good way to appeal to the human desire to be part of the “in-group.”
“Oh, a bunch of people have heard this quote and are searching for it? Well, I wanna be one of those cool people! Maybe I *have* heard the quote before!”
It’s just a vaguely relatable idea that sounds quotable even if there is nowhere the quote originates from
...didn't float away, it sank
Absolutely loving that song
The second line feels like Professor Fink from the Simspons but it could just be the voice you used
Ah, I was right that it was familiar because it was like a simpons quote but not quite, I wouldn't say I'd heard it even then, just that it sounds like a very typical joke that immediately feels familiar. Just because it's. Prototypical.
But very annoying have to yell 30 rock at my phone 10 times. 😅
Thought seeing it quote-of-the-day'd gives me another theory: Someone saw an obscure old tv show, liked the quote and made it their forum signature, re-pithysized into a 2 line structure, with quote marks but sans attribution. On a big forum where they were a big poster, people saw it every day but never asked where the quuote is from. And now, veteran nerds who forgot people even used to PUT quotes in forum signatures recognise it but have no memor of where from. Their minds ear provides each with different plausible voicing based on media they know with characters they recognise making them feel like they heard it, but they only ever read it, in forum signaures DESIGND to go conciously unnoticed.
Crucially, when people change their forum signatures, it updates their signature on old posts, so it would only be in archives, and if a forum isn't open without even a free account, it won't be archived. So you couldn't track this origin down.
I think it's from Friends. It sounds like a conversation Joey and Chandler had. But after seeing the 30 rock clip I'm not sure I've seen that episode a million times so that could've been it
My guess, 2 months late, is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I barely remember that movie, but I know there was an eccentric inventor character who would say something like that
I swear it’s from Futurama. That could also be the crazy inventor trope being made fun of from the old cop show. Futurama came out in 1999, so it could have been said a few years before the first post online about it.
The clip source might be Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka?
I thought this was made by a huge channel or something! Super impressive! I cant wait to see what you make in the future
My first thought was futurama. Seems like it would be an exchange between Leela and Professor Farnsworth. But i dont think i have ever actually heard that exact quote, just similar ones
I was thinking the other day about emergent phenomenon like this. like how every dan i have ever met is nicknamed handsome dan at some point. or every jeremy nicknamed jerbear.
I have never heard those nicknames in my life. Might've heard handsome Dan once or twice, but there's no particular instance that I can recall. I've known many Dans and Jeremys and none of them had those nicknames.
@@nicholasrella6904 hmm my experience may be a coincidence or maybe its regional
I may be 2 months late, but I have faint memories of this being from The Simpsons or something. I would have had to have learned it from memes or something. Maybe also Phineas and Ferb or some other children's tv show that is actually good? It's tickling my brain.
Yep, I definitely first heard it on P&F, and probably got sent a reaction gif of it at some point.
I’ll give him this, he knows his audience well, my first thought was “the machine” by lemon demon, lol
At first I thought, "this must be a trick because you would never give away your precious Jolibee, and I know that you got it in a one-off purchase from a confused street vendor. So it's not like you got a hundred of these in a back room somewhere." And then I thought, "that quote sounds like 'Brazil'... No wait, that isn't right, that's the one where product confusion is answered with 'it's for kids'. " So I got nothing, but I'm also entering the rest of the video wary of potential shenanigans. 👀
Futurama was my guess to the opening question for some reason
Got my mind set off on what the subject of the quote is. Is it a pointless machine? A book? A pet rock?
I feel like if it has an origin then it's something classical like Alice in Wonderland or CS Lewis. Then again it could equally be from a comedy musical from the golden era of them. Or from the original Police Squad series.
It sounds like some of the shtik Harvey Korman does in The Star Wars Holiday Special. That makes me think it might be an old joke told at Catskill resorts by comedians. Think New York Friars Club members in the 1950’s who all steal each other’s jokes.
I was thinking along the same lines. To me it sounded like something Morey Amsterdam would say on the old Dick Van Dyke show. Maybe it's a classic vaudeville punchline or something
My misunderstanding of puce and chartreuse came from Cyber Chase, finally accepting that reality
I'm not sure personally but it sounds like something the British would say, like in a Monty Python short. Lol
I'd guess l have heard it on Home Improvement or some family sitcom, like Love and Marriage. But that is really just the limitations of media ive absorbed in my lifetime, and well my memory. However I think the quote would predate those.
And the "cool S" I can't nail down the context, but I personally believe it could be from some "Magic Tricks and practical Illusions" or related topic book from the 70s/80s, I can't google find the one I had, but it was like 100 experiments and just random cool things, involving household objects and miscellaneity
i'm 15 mins in, sounds like a line from the civil servant in "yes minister" to me ;)
I think I first heard it on _Phineas and Ferb,_ but I can't be sure. If so, I think it was the episode where they made a wooden block toy out of Perry. EDIT: Well, that wasn't the origin, but I got the episode of the reference right! Go me!
that one website i watched another video where u mentioned it BUT I CANT REMEMBER IGH
I know I've seen it referenced in memes but can't say where it's from. It has the feeling of a print cartoon, something like Far Side, but I don't think that's where its from
Can't say I've ever heard the quote outside of Lemon Demon but I also have had cable for a negligible percentage of my life so maybe I've just been living under a rock
ive been stuck for 5 hours at the 2 second mark, when can i unpause
The sex in the city part is true in the russian translation, lol, it really was translated with that meaning, so maybe some of those who remember it that way are bilinguals who saw it first in some other language and later translated the mistranslation back to english in their heads
Doctor who?
Im thinking the simpsons, i have a fuzzy memory of that. but it also sees like a line that is repeated and repeated across media.
I think I’ve seen it on Futurama memes but idk if that’s what it’s from cuz I never really watched Futurama
Okay, first, the kook who says the line in Burke's Law is played by Burgess Meredith, who was already a respected character actor and would go on to appear as the original Penguin on Batman and in an iconic episode of The Twilight Zone. Personally, I think the rhythm of the joke sounds like Vaudeville banter. Early cartoons often recycled old bits from Vaudeville and minstrel shows. Those cartoons were aired on TV steadily throughout the 1950's into the 1980's. But, those cartoons were also full of racist stereotypes and by the 90's when Cartoon Network acquired the rights to most of that media they started censoring out the most offensive content. So, as a result, there is a considerable body of old media half-remembered by Boomers and Gen Xers that has since been lost. I suspect one of those old movies or cartoons could be the original source of the joke.
Look up old Seinfeld episodes. The cadence sounds like a conversations that would happen on there.
I heard it referenced about Pet Rocks (tm).
Seinfeld!
It's certainly a quote that sticks with you, but not too well--something that sounds like something you've heard before, a clever little joke, a brief little smile in your mind. It sounds like something that could have come from a thing you like, whatever that thing might've been... But not something so profound as to be remembered distinctly. My relatively mundane theory is that it did come from something specific, either Burke's law or something that influenced it, and it happened to worm its way into someone's brain until they remembered it, years later, and started asking about it. It works its way in and out of scripts and books for years until the internet comes along and people can start puzzling over it far more publicly than ever before, everyone certain it came from somewhere specific but none remembering exactly where from, since none really remember the exact phrase anyway.
Oh, and where I'm from, we called that S the "Super S". Maybe it's my personal bias but I think that's a better/cooler name than "Cool S".
Was it cloudy with a chance of meatballs?
26:53 is this loss?
I want to say i remember an interaction between word girl and mr bigs that’s along the same lines but I’m certain ive heard this quote somewhere else too
3:45 I literally may have known it from burke’s law lmao my grandma loved old trash tv like this, don’t remember this one in particular but then I was focused on my arts and crafts not grandmas shows
before watching: i dont think i can firmly think of ANY media with that as a solid quote. its more like a trope than a QUOTE
idk... hellsing?? does that movie even have that quote...?
"What's he doing in there?"