Oprah's famous quote.

YOU are eating shit! And YOU are eating shit! And YOU are eating shit!

Sigh. . . it looks like I'm gonna have to take this one, since no one else will.

It shouldn't be my responsibility to do this, but here goes: we need to all, collectively, cease and desist quoting Oprah's "you get a car!" announcement.

Okay? It's not funny. It's not funny now, it wasn't funny then. It may have been. . .
eh. . . cute?. . . when it was parodied for the very first time. And perhaps for a week after. Then, suddenly, it was dead.

This was almost twenty years ago. Entire graduating high school classes have come and gone with no memory of it happening!

So I guess I'm obligated to explain it, for posterity. Oprah Winfrey was known for sending audiences of her eponymous daytime talk show home with gifts and prizes.

On the show's season premiere in 2004, Oprah gifted everyone in the audience a brand new Pontiac G6 sedan. She had stagehands give everyone in the audience a gift box, and when they opened them, each box revealed a set of keys. As the audience went absolutely nuts screaming and jumping up and down, Oprah pointed around at individual people and said, "You get a car!" eight times, and then, "Everybody gets a car!" several times after that.

The atmosphere on the show continued to be crazy, but that's the gist of it for the purposes of my complaint.

I'm not here to attack Oprah herself or that segment of the show; this is only about the rest of the world's insistence on quoting it for two decades after the episode aired. ENOUGH ALREADY!

Any time anyone tells a story involving people obtaining giveaways, or describes situations when something is distributed widely, or even when anyone says "you get a. . ." about anything, they can't help but then shift it into parodying Oprah — if not with her theatrics, then with the words at bare minimum. It isn't funny.

And what's worse, the quote has become so ubiquitous, the routine so familiar that many people aren't even attempting humor when they say it. They just. . . say it. Absentmindedly. It's exactly like saying "that rhymes" when rhyming words, or the "try saying that five times fast" after saying a tongue twister, as I alluded to in another entry here.

It's annoying. It's played out. It's cringe. It's pointless. It's a waste of time.

So, I think we all need to come together, Beatles-style, and put this thing to bed. We can do that, can't we? We're better than this.

Now, quick-witted, insightful readers may be tripping over themselves to point out how this makes me an utter hypocrite. I knowingly repeat the same "unfunny" phrases over and over for years, even when others beg me to stop. Don't worry, I hear you. But here's the thing. I'm me, and you all aren't. ✍︎