The Titular Line

About

The Titular Line refers to a series of joke, memes and sketches regarding someone ironically and lazily delivering the title line of a movie.

Origin

While jokes regarding the titular lines have existed since before the internet, one of the earliest distillations of this as a specific joke occured on the Upright Citizens Brigade sketch comedy televisions series. On September 23rd, 1998, Comedy Central aired the fifth episode, entitled "Poo Stick."^[1] In the episode, there's a sketch in which a man attempts to convince a video store clerk that he had the titular lines in both Star Wars and Out of Africa, two films that do not have title lines in them (shown below).

Spread

Eight years later, on November 5ht, 2006, Urban Dictionary user PatientJobe published a definition of "titular" on the site, which references the Upright Citizens Brigade sketch (shown below). They define it as "A titular role is a role in which the character says the title of the movie or play or book. In the movie Out of Africa, when Robert Redford is teaching Meryl Streep how to drive, and there is all this traffic and this man drives up beside them and says, "Aww boy, Im just so tired of all this traffic, I can't wait until I get out of Africa." As of September 2017, the post received more than 120 upvotes.

On November 25th, 2008, YouTuber ^[2] odonreality posted a supercut of people saying the titular line of movies. The post (shown below) received more than 6,300 views in nine years.

On April 19th, 2009, an episode of Family Guy in which Peter Griffin talks about how much he enjoys when someone says the titular line aired. When posted to YouTube on May 4th, 2009, the clip of the scene has received more than 100,000 views in eight-and-a-half years.

On January 1st, 2011, the Tumblr ^[5] user thetitularline posted the first in a series of stills from famous movies with speech bubbles of characters forcing the titular line into the scene. The first picture (shown below, left) comes from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind with the fake titular line being "Looks like we're all having some close encounters of the third kind." Other examples include the film The Town (shown below, right).

On February 2nd, 2016, YouTuber^[3] Chris Huebs posted a video called "If Movies Ended When Someone Said the Title." The video featured moments in movies in which a character says the titular line before cutting to the closing credits. The post (shown below, left) received more than 1.7 million views in a year and a half.

Less than a week later, Huebs^[4] posted a follow up video, receiving more than 100,000 views as of September 2017.

On September 17th, 2017, the Twitter account @Saythetitle launched. Within a week, the account has amassed more than 22,000 followers. Much like the Tumblr account, @Saythetitle captions movie stills with fake dialogue in which character force the title of the movie into the lines. The account's most popular tweet was posted on September 18th. The post (shown below), which parodies Gone With the Wind, received more than 7,400 retweets and 22,000 likes in less than a week.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References