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"That's the beauty of it!"

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Anonymous

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"What does it do?"
"It doesn't DO anything. That's the beauty of it!"

You've heard it before, right? But where?

This quote (or is it?) has been puzzling a great many people on a variety of Internet forums for nearly two years. It seems that everyone who hears it is sure they've heard it somewhere before, but just can't quite remember from where. Is it from a movie, a TV series, a book? Nobody seems to know.

The question of this quote's origin seems to have first been asked in April 2003 on the Hatrack River forum, on Orson Scott Card's website, first here and then here . It quickly moved on to the IMDb boards but even the web's biggest collection of movie geeks couldn't crack it. It's now baffling the goons on the Something Awful forums.
There's a blog recording the ongoing research into this mystery.

Suggestions such as The Simpsons, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The 51st State, The Hudsucker Proxy, Futurama, Back to the Future, IBM commercials, Ender's Game, Clavin & Hobbes and more have been assiduously researched and have come up empty. The problem seems to be that whenever someone says "Oh, it's Homer, in that episode with his brother and the invention..." suddenly you CAN hear Homer saying just those lines. However many people have watched that episode and the mystery quote does not appear.

Various people have added things that they seem to be sure of, such as that the voices are speaking with British accents, the person answering the question is wearing a lab coat, or that the person asking the question is a woman. However none of this extra infomation seems to help track down the source.

Are we looking at a rogue meme, some kind of verbal virus that's loose on the web? The most engaging explanation I've heard it that this quote actually comes from a very popular movie, but that at some time in the past few years a time traveller from the future inadvertently altered our timeline in such a way that this movie was never made. This oh-so-familiar quote is all that remains in the collective unconscious, a ghostly echo in time.
 
Reminds me of the Wlliam Morris quote:

"Have nothing in your house
that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."
 
closest thing i can think of:

Moltar: Yeah, but.. what's it do?
SpaceGhost: *sigh* its symbolic Moltar, things don't always have to do something..... now help me plug it in
 
CoffeeJedi said:
closest thing i can think of:

Moltar: Yeah, but.. what's it do?
SpaceGhost: *sigh* its symbolic Moltar, things don't always have to do something..... now help me plug it in

This one has been mentioned several times on various forums, but I think it's unlikely to be the source. This seems to be an international phenomenon, but as far as I know Space Ghost isn't widely known outside the USA.
 
My guess is that it sounds like it comes from a spoof of all those Sc Fi films eg Star Trek with all the flashing lights etc in the control room. or a jokey reply by one of the incarnations of Dr Who about the Tardis.
 
I have a nasty feeling it's from Real Genius, I'll check.
 
my SO thinks its a scene where a man is asking a woman about why she needs an expensive vase
 
Heckler said:
I have a nasty feeling it's from Real Genius, I'll check.


Ooooh, I think you're right!
I'm going to go do some searches on that.

EDIT: Okay, I'm not sure it's the FIRST instance of it being said, but that quote is definitely in "Real Genius".
 
Heckler said:
I have a nasty feeling it's from Real Genius, I'll check.

Don't bother, this one was suggested over a year ago, and came up negative. Before anyone suggests anything else, I'd strongly recommend having a good look though the other forums, especially the blog I linked in the original post. Bear in mind that a great many people have been puzzling over this for nearly two years, and pretty much every obvious suggestion has been made dozens of times and debunked.

Oh god, what have I done? My first thread here and I've unleashed a psychic parasite on you all! I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Arrgh!

*runs away sreaming*
 
I'd already done the googling etc, it seems like it may be a rogue meme.
 
For some reason I hear Curtis Armstrong saying the reply, but in what I couldn't tell.
 
Probably a hybrid recollection of many similar exchanges.
for example

-- Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, examining the tailfins on a new model American car, asked "what do these do?"
The response, "Nothing, we just like them".

or a comic strip called "Robotman", in one strip Robotman was displaying a new spaceship he just built to his friends. "What do these flashing buttons do?" "Nothing, they just make it look cool".

There are probably dozens if not hundreds of similar examples in popular culture, including the Shatner moonbase one from the Airplane movie.
 
Cliff Smith said:
"What does it do?"
"It doesn't DO anything. That's the beauty of it!"

The first thing that popped into my mind upon reading it was MST3K. I can just imagine TV's Frank saying something like that during an invention exchange.
 
For some reason it sounds an awful lot like a quote from one of Douglas Adam's books. I must admit that the phrase sounds incredibly familiar to me too, although it may well be just another rogue meme.

EDIT: Do a google for "It doesn't DO anything. That's the beauty of it!". Top link sums the whole situation up quite well:

The quotation of indefinite origin - people have been debating its roots for a number of years to arrive at no conclusion. It's easy to imagine it as the witty retort of Calvin to his parents' prodding, or the reaction of Zaphod Beeblebrox to a dubious Arthur Dent. Maybe it's from a Simpsons or Futurama episode, or Back To the Future, or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. What about Dilbert? Some Steve Martin or Woody Allen film? Could've sworn it was from The Hudsucker Proxy.
All of these have been combed through, word by word. There are some close calls, but nothing exact.

The phenomenon of the quotation of indefinite origin is perplexing. It transcends regional barriers - an Australian will give you the same reaction as a Canadian. The elderly and children alike have the same spark of recognition, the most literate to the least educated, the wealthiest to the most impoverished. Very few just shake their head and admit to ignorance.

The most widely accepted conclusion explains that it's just two vaguely cliched lines tacked together. You've heard each piece separately, and it's witty enough to be from some film or television show, but thusfar it hasn't been proven as a direct reference to anything. Even if it has been used before, it would have to be in a form of media widespread enough to explain its universal familiarity.

Moreover, if one tries to use a search engine to find results, all they'll find are other people on the same quest. Maybe it has no origin - and that's the beauty of it.

(Note: Since the quotation of indefinite origin has gained recognition, many authors have started using it in their own work. Assume that if something was written post-2004, the quote was taken from this debate, not the other way around.)
 
But, what makes people certain it was from anything originally? Maybe people just used it because it fit the situation.

Not everything is a quote.


-Fitz
 
Perhaps the recognition factor is simply the result of combining two already familiar turns of phrase ("But what does it do?" and "That's the beauty of it!) into a longer quotation. Because we feel familiar with the constituent parts of the quotation, we feel a nagging sense of deja vu when reading the quotation as a whole.

If this is so, it should be possible to reproduce the effect by manufacturing such a meme from two shorter memes, but the best "composite" I can come up with myself is:

"Pieces of Eight? I should Coco!"

Does that sound naggingly familiar? Not really, but you get the idea.
 
Like many other people I'm probably wrong about it but when I heard the quote the first thing i thought about was the bit in Monty Python's 'The meaning of life' with all the medical equipment when the woman is giving birth (the machine that go's 'ping' ). Can't check it though as my copy is in the loft somewhere, wouldn't hold out much hope that it is, I can't imagine any conversation on the internet going on so long without mention of the pythons.
 
Lord_Flashheart said:
Like many other people I'm probably wrong about it but when I heard the quote the first thing i thought about was the bit in Monty Python's 'The meaning of life' with all the medical equipment when the woman is giving birth (the machine that go's 'ping' ). Can't check it though as my copy is in the loft somewhere, wouldn't hold out much hope that it is, I can't imagine any conversation on the internet going on so long without mention of the pythons.

And it went, wherever I did go...

ftf-find.jpg


But no.. the quote's not from the birth scene.

What came to mind when I first saw this was either Final Fantasy VII or one of the Sandman novels.
 
I think theres a similar quote in Star Trek IV. The crew are in 1987, and Captain Kirk goes to sell his antique glasses;

Spock; "But wern't they a present from Dr McCoy?"

Kirk; "And they will be again, thats the beauty of it"
 
Yes, but where did the quote come from?

That's the beauty of it! It didn't come from anywhere!
 
Great ! Four in the morning and half the files in my brain just fell out on the floor while I was trying to locate 'Nothing, that's the beauty of it '.

Still have 'George' runniing from isle to isle within the corridors of my brain. He's so sure he knows exactly where that line is located, but each time he heads purposely to a shelf, he suddenly remembers for *sure* this time, where he's stuck it. Like everyone else, it's just on the tip of my tongue ... then it slides away. Can almost see them saying it. In fact, I think an Australian tv commercial has hi-jacked those very words within (possibly) a stout commercial. Oh well, it's driving me mad now and will be a while until I can get rid of it, no doubt.
 
Is it from a cartoon in Punch? Or maybe Calvin and Hobbes? I seem to remember reading it (as in a cartoon), rather than hearing it (as in a movie). I checked my much loved copy of Best Cartoons from Punch of 1950 (my parents bought it, and sooner or later everyone in my family had just about every punch line memorized, and would, when reminded of a cartoon, say the punch line. My whole family would laugh, while others would simply stare at each other, not getting the joke. It's hard to explain) but couldn't find it there, but that doesn't mean it's not from Punch somewhere.
 
Am I the only one who doesn't think this sounds familiar...but I think Graylien is probably spot on the money.

Pieces of eight - I should cocoa!
 
You rotten swines. I will not know rest again now...

I immediately thought of Doctor Who...which means nothing. And yes, an English accent. I had a sudden mental flash of someone leaning over someone else's shoulder...
 
Found a similar line in a 1972 Doctor Who story, The Time Monster. The Doc has built some sort of gubbins out of corks, wine bottles and forks to thwart the Master's usual evildoing, but the good old Brigadier is unimpressed:

Brig: "And what's that supposed to be?"

Doctor: "You're a Philistine, Brigadier! It's not meant to be anything, it just is!"

Close, but not quite there yet...
 
Wembley said:
Am I the only one who doesn't think this sounds familiar...but I think Graylien is probably spot on the money.

same here. i don't recall ever having heard this specific "quote" before.
 
Could this quote be the Thunderbird photograph for the twenty-first century?
 
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