Rodney Dangerfield’s Iconic Catchphrase Only Worked Thanks to ‘The Godfather’
If there’s one thing people know about Rodney Dangerfield, it’s that he never received any admiration, regard or esteem. Dangerfield’s signature catchphrase about getting “no respect” from anyone was, of course, a foundational part of his stand-up act, his public persona and his mercifully brief hip-hop career.
But where did the line actually come from? Well, Dangerfield offered up a few different stories about the joke’s origin over the years. During a 1973 appearance on the game show What’s My Line? he claimed that it began with an encounter in an elevator. “How I first happened to start with ‘no respect’ was I actually felt I wasn’t getting any, as a lot of people do in life, and I said what I felt,” Dangerfield explained. “One day I was going in an elevator, and I was going to the third floor, and the elevator operator looked at me, and he said, ‘Basement?’”
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When he told the joke, he prefaced it by saying “I get no respect” and received a big laugh. “I just wrote hundreds of new jokes based on that same premise. And I found out that it’s something everyone is looking for,” the comedian added.
A little more than a decade later, Dangerfield recounted a different origin story. “I had this joke: ‘I played hide and seek; they wouldn’t even look for me,” he recalled in a 1986 interview. “To make it work better, you look for something to put in front of it: I was so poor, I was so dumb, so this, so that. I thought, ‘Now what fits that joke?’ Well, ‘No one liked me’ was all right. But then I thought, a more profound thing would be, ‘I get no respect.’”
In his 2001 memoir It Ain’t Easy Being Me, however, Dangerfield suggested that the line was partly informed by a popular novel, and caught on with the public thanks to the Oscar-winning movie it inspired: The Godfather.
Dangerfield said that his original catchphrase, which set up many of his early jokes, was “nothing goes right.” Per Dangerfield, “It worked pretty well, but a few years later, the book The Godfather came out and it was a bestseller and then the movie came out, which was even bigger.”
“Because of The Godfather, suddenly all anybody would talk about was ‘respect,’” Dangerfield wrote. “You’ve gotta show me some respect… If she’s with me, you show her respect… It’s all about respect.”
“I realized that fit pretty well with the image I was now working with onstage, so I decided to come up with a joke that had the word ‘respect’ in it.”
Thus, he worked it into the hide-and-seek joke, and the “crowd loved it” even quoting the “no respect” line back to him afterwards.
Following this success, Dangerfield kept putting the line into his jokes — and, eventually, antacid commercials.
