Mike Myers says you possibly can’t simply make a catchphrase occur. “I’ve by no means designed a catchphrase. I identical to how folks discuss,” Myers told Vulture late last year. “Keep in mind ‘Get in my stomach?’ That was improv. It wasn’t, ‘Girls and gents, my subsequent catchphrase.’”
However Jaleel White says the producers of Family Matters have been intent on making a signature slogan for his Urkel character. “They tried 1,000,000 darn catchphrases,” he told Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong and Will Friedle on the Pod Meets World podcast, per People.
It took some time to get to “Did I do this?” White stated — and a number of the early stabs have been fairly lame. “The primary one which they ever tried actually was Steve would simply stumble upon inanimate objects — an finish desk or a lamp, knock it over and say, ‘Excuse me.’ That was it.”
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Er, simple to see why that one didn’t catch on.
One other strive for the clumsy character was “I’ve fallen, and I can’t rise up,” already a well-liked catchphrase because of an overplayed industrial for medical alarm firm Life Alert.
The phrase may by no means be Urkel’s alone, but it surely was used usually sufficient that White listed it as one of many character’s in style phrases in his latest autobiography, Rising Up Urkel. He additionally remembers “Do you may have any cheese?” as one other entry within the catchphrase sweepstakes.
The one which hit, after all, was “Did I do this?” That line of dialogue was repeated so usually that YouTube followers make compilation reels of the road being repeated time and again.
“‘Did I do that?’ just stuck,” White explained, noting that Family Matters’ live studio audience was the final arbiter of what worked and what didn’t. “It’s one of those things. You lob them out to the audience, and, you know, back then it was completely about the immediate audience reaction. You had that live studio audience to tell you in real time what was working. There was no social media.”
The absence of TikTok, Twitter and Instagram is one of White’s favorite things about doing TV comedy in the ‘90s. “There were no message boards. There were no people who hated us or disliked us and thought our show was terrible,” he said. “It’s like, you thought our show was terrible, you didn’t watch, or maybe you were a TV critic and you bashed us. And we were kids anyway, so I’m sure they told you the same crap they told us: ‘All those critics don’t know what they’re talking about. Look at our ratings.’ And then that was that was the end of it.”
