Think Catchphrases Are Dead? Eat My Shorts.
This episode was written by Willa Paskin, who produces Decoder Ring with Katie Shepherd. This episode was edited by Joel Meyer. Derek John is Slate’s executive producer of narrative podcasts. Merritt Jacob is our senior technical director.
Thank you to Luke Winkie, Stephen Langford, Doug Dietzold and The Good, the Bad and the Sequel podcast, and Shawn Green for the suggestion and Urkel clips.
If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at DecoderRing@slate.com
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Listen and follow along
Transcript
Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.
I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.
He's going the distance.
He was the highest paid TV star of all time.
When it started to change, it was quick.
He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.
Now, Charlie's sober.
He's gonna tell you the truth.
How do I present this with a class?
I think we're past that, Charlie.
We're past that, yeah.
Somebody call action.
Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.
Before we begin, this episode contains some adult language.
You know one when you hear one.
I'm talking about a catchphrase.
How you doing?
A catchphrase is a phrase.
Maybe it's just a few words.
Eat my shorts.
Yeah, baby.
Maybe it's even a made-up word.
Shuzanyung.
DOW!
It could be that made-up word twice.
Or three times.
Yada yada yada.
I never heard from him again.
It's often very closely associated with a performer or character.
And it catches on seemingly everywhere.
Go ahead, make my day.
Not only do people recognize a phrase like this, they use it.
And I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers.
Go ahead, make my day.
That's President Ronald Reagan quoting the line made famous by Clint Eastwood.
It was 1985 and the famed monoculture was reaching millions of people, delivering the same snappy sound bites to all of them, and doing it so effectively that decades later, we're still swimming in catch races from the past.
Well, don't have a cow, man.
It's time for a Muapalooza, the signature event at the Wisconsin State Fair.
Oh yeah, good day to get out and stream.
Yaba-dabba-doo, it's gonna be nice.
I wanna thank everybody here and
Hastela Vista, baby, thank you.
That's from former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's farewell speech last year.
And yet he's quoting an Arnold Schwarzenegger line, it's more than three decades old.
Astala Vista, baby.
And it is difficult to find a recent catchphrase that's quite so recognizable.
But that's not because the catchphrase is dead.
It's just because it's changed.
What the what?
What the what?
What the what?
What the what?
This is Decoder Ring.
I'm Willa Paskin.
Every catchphrase has a life cycle.
It starts like any other line, but then audiences warm to it.
They love it.
They elevate it.
And it starts to get repeated.
And as it does, some of the people who loved it start to roll their eyes when they hear it, even as this phrase is burrowing deeper and deeper into our collective lexicon.
And this isn't just what happens to any one catchphrase.
It's what's happened to the catchphrase itself.
A form some people love and others sneer at, even as it remains totally inescapable.
So, we're going to look at the catchphrase with clear eyes and full hearts.
We're going to consider how they lived long and prospered until they did not.
So, come on down, lend me your ears, treat yourself.
As today on Decodering, we ask, what happened to the catchphrase?
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Once you start noticing catchphrases, it's hard hard to stop.
That's what she said.
You've got Austin Powers catchphrases and Ace Ventura catchphrases that are still in 2023, Year of Our Lord, still being said by people, which is wild.
Sean Green is a graphic designer and podcaster, and he has a nickname.
I go by bingo.
I gave it to myself, which is tacky, but I do.
I am bingo.
Bingo's also a listener, and he wrote to us because he was curious about the catchphrases whole deal.
I love sitcoms more than any other art form.
It's my favorite art form.
And I know that it's hokey and saccharine and plastic and cheesy.
I like when sitcoms jump the shark and get even worse.
And one of the things that are in sitcoms so, so much are catchphrases.
Dang all my
you got it, dude.
But it's not just sitcoms.
There are also the big mainstream movie comedies Bingo mentioned earlier.
One million dollars.
Oh, righty that.
My wife.
And there are other super well-known phrases that don't come from films or TV shows.
Where I work, people, again, in this
year, are saying, who let the dogs out as a as like a sort of a catchphrase?
Who let the dogs out?
Like, it can get so much bigger, like political slogans.
We will make America great again.
Are they catchphrases what about advertising slogans
are they catchphrases i don't think it counts it's selling an idea it's selling a brand it's selling a uh a call to action to a certain degree um whereas did i do that
is just being like oh urkel said that thing and everyone's like really happy about it bingo is referring to steve urkel the nerdy catchphrase spouting star of the 1990s sitcom family matters and bingo actually has a theory about Urkel that we're going to get to later.
But before that, we need to start with when the modern catchphrase caught on.
People have been repeating pithy phrases to one another for a very long time.
This is the basis of epic poetry and many religious rituals.
Shakespeare was as quotable then as he is now, and vaudevillax relied on catchphrases too.
But we're going to begin when mass audiences could hear these phrases simultaneously for the first time.
Were there catchphrases in radio shows, like in the olden radio days?
Of course, there were catchphrases on radio in olden days.
Susan Douglas is a professor of media and communication at the University of Michigan and the author of Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination.
Remember, this is a medium that denies sight to its audience.
So voice and language matters totally.
And those voices were reaching people on an unprecedented scale.
Radio was such a phenomenon by the late 1920s and early 30s.
You have 40 million people sometimes listening to the same thing simultaneously.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Amos and Andy Show.
Amos and Andy was a signature program from the early radio era.
It featured the voices of two white actors playing black men who had migrated from the south to the north.
It has not aged well.
It was a combination sitcom and minstrel show.
Not unproblematic, but also hugely popular.
Susan says when Amos and Andy came on the radio, people stopped everything to listen.
If you were in the movie theater, the movie theater had to shut the film down for 15 minutes.
Toilets remained unflushed.
Taxis remained unhailed.
And we still know some of its catchphrases.
Everybody starts saying, holy mackerel.
Holy mackerel, it's three o'clock now.
And there are other phrases from early radio that are also still with us.
Don't touch that dial because there's nothing else on.
The shadow knows.
Now cut that out.
Growing up, I knew all of these phrases, not because I was alive in the early days of radio, but because they'd survived into my own childhood.
A version of Jack Benny's Now Cut That Out even made it onto my favorite sitcom in elementary school, the late 80s, early 90s, Full House.
Cut it out.
But for all the catchphrases that have lingered, there are more that have not.
A lesser-known comedian was a guy named Joe Penner,
who was a huge hit on radio.
And Joe Penner knew how to use his voice really well.
He would slide it up and down.
You nasty man!
You nasty man, became a huge catchphrase.
Here's one that is completely inexplicable.
You want to buy a duck?
Why?
Who knows?
Another one was: don't ever do
that
don't ever do that
those all became catchphrases in the early 1930s remember there would have been something novel about just how many people knew these phrases and that was something radio performers used to their advantage there's a repetition and then there becomes a knowingness to the repetition because the person uttering the catchphrase now knows it's become a catchphrase.
And so they use it even more to emphasize wink wink to the audience that it is a catchphrase.
And it pulls audiences in.
It makes them feel like they're part of this imagined community.
You know, that was a power that radio had that vaudeville or Broadway simply didn't.
Television had that same power.
And as commercial TV took off off in the 1950s, radio shows and stars flocked to it, and the catchphrase came with them.
Now you could see a catchphrase on a show like The Honeymooners.
You want the world of Tamara, Alex?
You want the world of Tamara?
I'll give you the world of Tamara.
You're going to the moon!
Or on the George Burns and Gracie Allen show.
Say good night, Gracie.
Good night.
Good night.
In the 1960s, Batman sidekick, Robin, varied his catchphrase every time he said it.
Holy magician, holy alphabet, holy ball and chain, holy fruit salad.
And the variety sketch show, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, varied who said it.
It's sock it to me, Tom.
Sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me.
Sock it to yourself.
Sock it to me, honey.
Laugh-in was the number one show in America from 1968 to 1970.
Its title was a riff on be-ins and lovins, and it was aimed at a young audience.
It had political jokes and groovy psychedelic sets, and it popularized the phrase socket to me, which was said by cast members and guest stars, including Sammy Davis Jr., Milton Burrell, and in a particularly memorable cameo from 1968, then presidential candidate Richard Nixon.
Socket to me.
On Laugh-In, the catchphrase was cool, and the Nixon campaign wanted some of that.
And Laugh-In wasn't the only hip variety show in which the catchphrase abounded.
Live from New York, it's Saturday night.
Saturday Night Live debuted in 1975.
Subversive, countercultural, and loaded with quotable sayings.
Cheesebacker, cheesebacker, cheesebacker, four pets, too cheap.
Cheesebugger, cheesebugger, cheesebugger, too petsy, for cheap.
In short order, SNL's live studio audience was waiting in anticipation for familiar characters to deliver their familiar lines.
We are the wild and crazy guys.
And this same frenzy also greeted the most popular character on TV.
How come you don't get to pay anything?
How come?
Because I'm the Fonz.
The Fonz, also known as Fonzi, also known as Arthur Fonzarelli, was the leather jacket-wearing star of the sitcom Happy Days, though that hadn't been the creator's intention.
When we first started Happy Days, Fonzie was not an important character.
Bill Bickley has been a television producer and writer for 53 years, and he was a showrunner on the early seasons of Happy Days.
He showed up very little in some of the early episodes because it wasn't really about Fonzie at all.
Instead, the show, which premiered in 1974, though it was set in the 1950s, was supposed to be about a family.
But audiences took a liking to Fonzie, who was played by Henry Winkler, and the writers noticed.
By its second season, Happy Days had reoriented around the Fonz and become a huge hit.
And in just about every episode, Fonzi would say,
This wasn't the only thing the Fons repeated.
He would also flash a thumbs up, mesmerize women with a snap of his fingers, and he could start a jukebox just by banging it with his fist.
One time, he even got all the animals in a suburban backyard to quiet down.
Cool it.
That was taken way too far.
Hey, the thumbs up.
Those things started to get repeated, and it really got boring.
It seems worth mentioning here that the term jump the shark, which is now regularly used to describe when a show stops being good anymore, was coined in the mid-1980s in reference to a happy days episode in which the Fons
water skis
over a shark while wearing a tiny bathing suit and his leather jacket.
In the 1980s, the catchphrase itself was jumping the shark, shedding its cool while staying extremely popular.
And no one captured these highs and lows quite like the decade's most catchphrase-laden breakout character.
When we come back,
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Now, back to the show.
So, I have to confess that despite my brain being jammed with catchphrases, I'd never really thought about them until we got that email from the listener you heard from earlier.
I go by bingo.
Bingo wrote to us with an observation about one sitcom character in particular.
I haven't done the full science on this, right?
Because I have a full-time job, but I do believe that Steve Q.
Urkel from the hit show Family Matters has the
most catchphrases of any fictional character ever created.
Steve Urkel was a nerdy, sweet black kid with glasses, suspenders, and his pants hiked up to his chest.
And he was the star of the sitcom Family Matters.
He was played by Jalil White, and Bingo's right.
Urkel does have a lot of catchphrases.
Well, the classic is, of course, Did I do that?
Did I do that?
Did I do that?
Did I do that?
Don't speak.
Did I do that?
That one is the most famous, but it's just the beginning.
No sweat, my pet.
You got me cheese.
You love me, don't you?
All told, bingo counted 16 Urkel catchphrases, and they are a great example of just how well these quips can work until they start to drive you up the wall.
The story of Steve Urkel begins with a whole other series.
The Cosby show premiered in 1984 on NBC.
It was about the Huxtables, an affluent black family, and it was not just a huge hit.
It was a seismic cultural phenomenon.
Soon, every TV network wanted a Cosby show of its own.
The network actually came to us and said, could you do a black family?
That's Bill Bickley, the writer-producer you heard from earlier, who worked on Happy Days.
So my partner and I, who is also white,
we just dreamed up these characters.
And
so we went into the network and they
it was a very easy sale.
It was easy because Bickley and his writing partner, Michael Warren, were already working for the network, ABC, on the hit sitcom Perfect Strangers.
They took a minor character from that show, an elevator operator, gave her a police officer husband, added three kids, a grandmother, an aunt, and a house in Chicago, and the Winslows were born.
When Family Matters premiered in 1989, it wasn't a flop, but it wasn't quite a hit either.
The network wasn't happy with the ratings, and the writers were struggling to figure out the character's dynamics and what the show was really about.
Jaleel White, who wasn't a part of the cast yet, actually remembers watching the show at home and he could see it wasn't quite working.
Like there was this moment when the aunt plops down into a chair.
She's exhausted and she's like, oy Vei.
This is White in a 2021 interview with the rapper Talib Quali on his People's Party podcast.
They let that black woman come through the door and just say, oi Ve.
And so there was a lot of moments like that and why the show wasn't even so funny because you had a white room writing for black people in Chicago.
Midway through the first season, Bill Bickley and the show's other co-creator, neither of whom were Jewish, by the way, they actually met at church, were desperate for ideas.
So they borrowed from themselves, repurposing part of an unsuccessful pilot script they'd written about a white family.
It was like, okay, what if your father, meaning well, got you the worst possible date for your first dance?
That was the idea.
And the name of the kid who was the worst possible date?
Steve Urkel.
It was supposed to be a one-episode part, but then Jalil White came in for the audition.
It's Jalil White that actually invented the character of Steve Urkel.
His father was a dentist.
He borrowed the glasses you wear to protect your eyes, and he hiked his pants up.
And this kid blows us away.
This kid is fantastic.
So they signed a deal to make him a regular in a hurry.
Urkel debuted in the 12th episode of Family Matters.
Hi, Laura.
I hear you can't get a date for the dance.
So you want to go with me?
Urkel immediately reoriented the show.
The largely white writing staff finally understood what the show should be about.
It should be about Urkel.
There was a kid who needed family and latched on to the Winslows Winslows on all levels.
That was the, to me, that then gave us a key for the series.
Now we had that thing that could really drive the show.
Now, as far as my character is concerned, the thing that I always love
is Steve loved cheese, polka.
He played the accordion.
Everything about him was white and weird.
Jalil White again.
So it made him as a character easy to write for the writers.
They were excited now.
Like they were hyped.
Finally, we got something we can write for.
And then just, you know, now this is where I will tip my hat a little bit.
Just as a credit to myself, I would find a way to inject soul
and
a uniqueness.
With Urkel in the cast, the ratings started to climb.
Jaleel White single-handedly turned Family Matters into a top five hit as Urkel Mania swept the country.
Urkel was on talk shows and award shows.
Ladies and gentlemen, here is the reason that ABC's stock soared 12 points in the last quarter.
He inspired an episode of The Simpsons, in which Bart rockets to fame on the back of an Urkel-esque catchphrase.
I didn't do it.
And meanwhile, Urkel's own catchphrases kept coming.
Steve,
you're coming for it.
I'm wearing you down, baby.
I'm wearing you down.
I don't have to take this.
I'm going home.
I'm going home.
I'm going home.
And a number of them even ended up being used for an Urkel doll.
He's got my looks, my laughs, my voice, and all.
Can I get that?
So you gave him me.
Get the next best thing.
Adjustful mushrooms.
This was all familiar territory for Family Matters co-creator Bill Bickley.
What had happened with Fonzie on Happy Days was happening all over again with Urkel.
I've got a Steve Urkel doll over there.
He keeps saying these things and haunts me.
Bill would actually cut Urkel's catchphrases out of scripts or try to bargain and say, do them twice, not three times.
It was a losing battle.
The network latches on to shit like this.
It wasn't just the network, though.
I would laugh so hard.
Like, but you know, you know, like when the laughter is like, you don't have any control over the laugh.
It just comes out.
Kenny Lucas is one half of the comedy duo, The Lucas Brothers, and he and his brother Keith were around six or seven when Urkel Mania hit its peak.
It was perfect timing for us.
Oh, yeah.
If we had been a little older, I don't think we would have appreciated the silliness of Urkel.
Urkel did get very silly.
Over its ninth season run, Family Matters had Urkel clone himself, get a suave doppelganger named Stefan Urkel, and go to space.
It was weird.
The Lucas Brothers' own comedy can also be surreal, and they count Urkel as an influence.
They even did a sketch about him in 2014, spoofing the writers who fatefully retooled Family Matters.
Okay, all right, fine.
If they want to cancel our show after 11 episodes, then I say let's go down in flames.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
What y'all got in mind?
Look, I was thinking, right?
What about a black nerd?
But there aren't black nerds.
No, Doug, that's the point, man.
So when we add one to this TV show, it'll be so terrible, every executive will lose their jobs too.
What?
I'm curious what, both as viewers of Family Matters, but also as comedians, you make of like the catchphrase.
Oh, did I do that?
I mean, iconic.
And existential, you know, it's like, yeah, of course he did it, but it's like he still poses the question and
it hits every time.
But like, like you think like you were watching like
episode 163 and like the tail end of season eight.
I'll be honest.
I stopped watching after season seven.
This is ridiculous.
After a while, yeah, you're like, all right,
the catchphrase isn't working anymore.
For some, it had never worked.
I just didn't like Urkel.
William Evans is a writer and also the co-creator of the website and book, Black Nerd Problems.
When there are few at the time, when you see these images of yourself in media,
there kind of is this instant, you know, am I like this person?
Do I know someone like this person kind of a thing?
And I just remember watching that, like,
don't nobody know who this mother, like, who, who, what?
Why am I dealing with Urkel?
Urkel's peak popularity came in the early 1990s when gangster rap was on the radio and the LA riots were in the news.
And William thinks that has something to do with a character's appeal.
I think Urkel in itself becoming so popular was really
indicative of how
thirsty folks were to see a black caricature that was not threatening, that was quote-unquote cute and adorable.
No, sweet, my pet.
Even with all his qualms, you should know Williams sometimes watched Family Matters.
It was inescapable.
Though less and less as it went on.
Yeah, I got to a point where I was like, I'm good.
I'm good.
By the time Family Matters ended in 1998 after 215 episodes, Jalil White was pretty sick of it too.
He is much more measured about it now, but he once said to a reporter, if you ever see me do that character again, take me out and put a bullet in my head.
The catchphrase had helped make Urkel, but now everyone just wanted to get as far from the character and his quips as possible.
When we come back, that feeling about catchphrases carries into the new millennium.
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In 2011, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch called The Original Kings of Catchphrase Comedy.
The four kings of catchphrase are back and they're going absolutely crazy.
The segment skewered stand-up comedians who rely on the catchphrase.
Ooh,
funky boy.
There are other catchphrases, including slappy pappy wang wang, and a comedian who uses someone else's catchphrase.
Bust in power, do I make you horny, baby?
This was not 2011's most successful SNL sketch, but it seems close to the heart of the comedians who made it, and it would get two follow-ups.
Saturday Night Live, the show that had and continues to give the world a disproportionate number of catchphrases, was making fun of them as something hokey and hacky.
Former SNL head writer Tina Fey teased them too on her show 30 Rock when her character, Liz Lemon, greedily comes up with a catchphrase of her own.
Long distance is the wrong distance, Sue.
Deal breaker.
Mickey Rourke wants to take me camping.
Deal breaker, Jenna?
God.
And I haven't seen my fiancé in seven months.
Sari, I have two words for you.
robot warning.
Okay, that catchphrase needs a little work.
Deal breaker.
Sitcoms, especially the traditional multi-camera ones whose stock and trade was the catchphrase, were increasingly seen as old-fashioned, even as the form, along with the big studio comedy, was falling on hard times.
The audiences for these tried-and-true catchphrase delivery systems were fragmenting and they were reaching fewer people than before.
Catchphrases do sometimes still come from scripted entertainment.
This is the way.
This is the way.
May the odds be ever in your favor.
Winter is coming.
But comedies in particular supply them far less often than they used to.
And if you think that means we've stopped saying the same things,
that's not quite right either.
A couple of years ago, some pictures of a whiteboard crammed with writing started making their way around the internet.
The board is like a three by four whiteboard just listing every line that you've heard repeated for the last 20 years.
Anders Holm is an actor, writer, and co-creator of the comedy Workaholics, about a group of friends who work and live together.
It ran for seven seasons on Comedy Central, and the whiteboard is a creation of its writer's room.
I think we had planned to do a teaser that was going to be exclusively these jokes.
And it was going to be like a two-minute machine gun of
nailed it.
He's right behind me, isn't he?
I didn't not fart.
Are you having a stroke?
Why are you whispering?
Random.
Zero fucks given.
I just peed a little.
I think I just peed a little.
I think I just peed a little.
Like all the ones that we know and they're good.
And when you hear them the first time, you go, whoa, she threw open her mouth a little bit hilarious visual but then when like it's been 10 years and somebody at target says that to you after they like hold up a bag of rotten apples or whatever
then you go do they know that's from dodgeball i said we should date sometime you know socially go out and kick it
are you okay
i'm fine i just uh
threw up in my mouth a little bit.
The famous catchphrases of the past tended to be closely associated with the people flogging them.
A comedian, a character, a comedy that repeated them over and over.
But now they're often untethered, which actually makes them easier for other professionals to use.
The Workaholics team didn't end up making that teaser, but they kept compiling these kinds of jokes.
Eventually, they had so many they had to start a second whiteboard, over 100.
And to be clear, it's not exactly that Anders and the other writers dislike these phrases.
They just have a sense of professional pride when it comes to using these jokes in their own show.
They are funny, but they're not surprising anymore, right?
And surprise is part of comedy.
When we meet somebody new, like a new actor, and we kind of never seen their sensibility before, it's like shocking how funny they are.
And then after a while, you kind of aren't surprised anymore.
And I'm realizing I'm like a personality type now and maybe not a good one, but I'm like, yeah, I remember like going out of my way in college to not say, I know, right.
Dude, that was crazy.
I know, right?
And I was like, why, why are we all saying this now?
I have to stop saying this.
As befits someone who pays this much attention to language, Anders and the other writers wanted to come up with catchphrases of their own.
We were like, let's see what's like the craziest thing we could say and see if people will start saying it on the street.
Matt, my friend, is totally loose butthole.
Excuse me, this entire outfit is completely tight butthole.
We started saying tight butthole
out of like an experiment.
And tight butthole wasn't the only line that got picked up.
Let's get weird!
Let's get weird!
Weird!
That's where, from when Adam and Blake went to go see Weird Al at the OCE Fair and started a chant, Let's Get Weird.
The National Hockey League decided to use it for a promotional campaign one season.
Let's
And we were like, huh?
Oh, okay.
Great.
This line had a very specific origin, but it could work in a much more general way for a major sports league.
It had become the kind of punchline that could go on the whiteboard.
In 2023, there are still catchphrases we all use to communicate, and some of them are even very closely associated with the people who originally said them.
Good morning,
But it's just as likely they're from a meme, a tweet, a TikTok, a YouTube video, an influencer, or some random viral moment.
And often it's hard to tell where they began at all.
What you can tell is that all of a sudden, it feels like something lots of people are saying.
Maybe too many.
Your relatives are saying it, strangers too, people at work, and it's in your own mouth.
Or maybe you've only ever written it in a group chat or shared it as a gif on social media.
And the reason for using these phrases, these modern clichés, is the same as it ever was.
It brings people together.
It is literally language that we share, however unoriginal it has become.
And we've found a way to keep sharing this kind of language even as the way we receive it has changed.
It's actually kind of resourceful of us.
We may not know exactly where these lines come from, but we'll take our catchphrases and the sense of community they create anywhere we can get them.
Come on, Lisa, say something funny.
Like what?
Oh, something stupid like Bart would say.
Bucka bucka or wuzzle-wazzle, Wuzzle.
Something like that.
Forget it, Dad.
If I ever become famous, I want it to be for something worthwhile, not because of some obnoxious fad.
Obnoxious fad.
Aw, don't worry, son.
You know they said the same thing about Urkel?
This is Decodering.
I'm Willa Paskin.
If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.
This episode was written by me, Willa Paskin.
I produced Decodering with Katie Shepard.
This episode was edited by Joel Meyer.
Derek John is Slate's executive producer of narrative podcasts, and Merit Jacob is our senior technical director.
Thank you to Stephen Lankford, Doug Dietzelt, and the Good, the Bad, and the Sequel Podcast, and to Sean Green for the suggestion and the Urkel clips.
I'd also like to thank all the Slate staffers who helped us brainstorm catchphrases.
I mentioned Slate Plus earlier in this episode.
Please sign up.
Members will get an upcoming bonus episode about how this season was made.
We'll also talk about one more unpethered catchphrase with Slate writer Luke Winky.
The ubiquitous, let's go.
And you should go to slate.com slash decoder plus to sign up now.
If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed and Apple podcasts wherever you get your podcasts.
And even better, tell your friends.
That's it for this season.
We'll be back in October.
Until then, thanks for listening.
Yo, this is important, man.
My favorite Lululemon shorts, the ones you got me back in the day, I think they're pacebreakers, the ones with all the pockets.
Well, I just got back from vacation, and I think I left them in my hotel room.
And dude, I need to replace these shorts.
I wear them like every day with that Lulu hoodie you got me.
Could you send me the link to where you got them?
Thanks, bro.
Talk soon.
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