Mike Myers says you can’t just make a catchphrase happen. “I’ve never designed a catchphrase. I just like how people talk,” Myers told Vulture late last year. “Remember ‘Get in my belly?’ That was improv. It wasn’t, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, my next catchphrase.’”
But Jaleel White says the producers of Family Matters were intent on creating a signature slogan for his Urkel character. “They tried a million darn catchphrases,” he told Danielle Fishel, Rider Strong and Will Friedle on the Pod Meets World podcast, per People.
It took a while to get to “Did I do that?” White said — and some of the early stabs were pretty lame. “The first one that they ever tried really was Steve would just bump into inanimate objects — an end table or a lamp, knock it over and say, ‘Excuse me.’ That was it.”
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Er, easy to see why that one didn’t catch on.
Another try for the clumsy character was “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up,” already a popular catchphrase thanks to an overplayed commercial for medical alarm company Life Alert.
The phrase could never be Urkel’s alone, but it was used often enough that White listed it as one of the character’s popular phrases in his recent autobiography, Growing Up Urkel. He also remembers “Do you have any cheese?” as another entry in the catchphrase sweepstakes.
The one that hit, of course, was “Did I do that?” That line of dialogue was repeated so often that YouTube fans make compilation reels of the line being repeated over and over.
“‘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.”