by FREDERICA VON McTOAST-HYPHEN, Alternate Reality News Service Pop Culture Writer
Catchphrases – words or series of words repeated by fictional characters until they take up more precious mental real estate in the popular imagination than, say, the equitable distribution of economic wealth or curing cancer – have long been a staple of sketch and situation comedies. All that is needed to redeem a thinly drawn character is to have it repeat phrases such as “Wowie kaplowie!” or “Eat my undershirt!” or “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times: superstructure precedes infrastructure!” week in and week out, until the audience learns to enjoy it from sheer exhaustion.
Where did catchphrases begin? “Not that there’s anything wrong with that” wasn’t the first. “We are two wild and crazy guys” wasn’t the beginning. “One of these days, Alice, BANG! POW! – to the moon!” didn’t start the phenomenon, although you are getting closer.
No, the very first recorded catchphrase was “Eat your vegetables one at a time, Richard!” It was first uttered by the incomparable Ettie Mae Beauregard in the popular radio serial Dreams of an Underclass Father Knows Riley’s Life Best in 1927.
Beauregard, born Simcha Schmetsky, emigrated to the United States at the tender age of 32 when her parents fled the infamous Irish potato famine then taking place in Minsk. She was discovered when Irving Goffman, one of the producers of the inexplicably successful You Bet Your First Born!, ran her over in his horseless carriage; fortunately, since it couldn’t go more than 20 miles per hour, she was only partially disfigured. Stricken with guilt, Goffman immediately hired her to play a part in his next radio series, about an immigrant family in New York. The only condition he placed on the casting was that she change her name, since Schmetsky is an ancient Babylonian word for a very naughty part of a woman’s anatomy.
The line, as originally written by Harold Garbardine, was “Eat your vegetables, Richard!” Gabardine, who would be briefly famous seven years later as one of the 27 writers of the Broadway hit Schenectady Follies of 1931 (it was the Depression, and for many years the names of plays were closely rationed), was furious that Beauregard had changed the line. The studio audience, however, laughed so hard that the show ran five minutes over, pushing back a presidential address from Calvin Coolidge that, to be honest, nobody really wanted to listen to anyway.
Histories of the early days of radio claim that she changed the line as a tribute to her life in Russia, where food was so scarce that it had to be rationed one portion at a time. However, in his autobiography, Shameless Pandering, Gabardine wrote that Beauregard was simply not a very good actor who had a history of flubbing her lines. “When the line became popular,” he wrote, “they had to write it in big letters on a piece of cardboard for that woman to read so that she could get it right.”
That may be the first recorded use of cue cards, but I won’t say any more on the subject before I’ve had a chance to pitch a new article on it to my editor.
We may never truly know how the catchphrase came to be. What we do know is that the line became a sensation, and the writers of the show were encouraged to use it every chance they got. The line appeared in one episode 27 times, half of them in scenes that had nothing remotely to do with eating; Beauregard’s character would simply walk into a scene, say it, and leave. At the height of the phrase’s popularity, the producers considered creating a new series that took place entirely in the family’s kitchen where the catchphrase was said every 30 seconds, but that was considered too avant garde for the time.
Then, as now, imitators quickly sprang up hoping to cash in on the success of the catchphrase. (Then, as ever, I suppose: Homer’s imitators were legion. If they weren’t actually all him.) Chet Markham had modest success with the catchphrase “I wouldn’t do that without a monkey wrench!” on The Firebird Laxative Hour. Other competing catchphrases of the era included: “Oh, what fools these Mormons be,” “Who’d a know’d it?” ” and “Don’t talk to your mother like she was some kind of Austrian!”
Eventually, inevitably, the popularity of Dreams of an Underclass Father Knows Riley’s Life Best waned and, in 1934, the show was cancelled. Owing to her disfigurement (one critic of the time likened her to “a living, breathing Braque painting”), Beauregard was not able to make the transition to film or television. She spent the last 43 years of her life in the Max Planck Home for Historically Important but Forgotten Entertainers.
Despite the sad ending to her story, Ettie Mae Beauregard will always be remembered for popularizing the immortal phrase “Eat your vegetables one at a time, Richard!”, and creating the phenomenon of the catchphrase. Well…by media historians if nobody else.