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Yippee-Ki-Yay ...The greatest one-liner in movie history.

By Eric LichtenfeldPosted Tuesday, June 26, 2007, at 12:33 PM ET

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On the city streets of America, buses have been displaying a strange ad. No art, just white print on black, a slogan stranded between English and gibberish: "Yippee Ki Yay Mo—." Although the line is not spelled the way it's pronounced, it's still recognizable as the first half of a well-known action-movie one-liner. The ad is teasing the June 27 release of Live Free or Die Hard. Since the Die Hard franchise, and its catchphrase, have been absent from the screen for 12 years, a question arises: do the words "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker" still matter? And why did they resonate in the first place?

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First heard in the original Die Hard in 1988, "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker," is one of the many one-liners that have graced the action film, a body of work not known for its strong verbal tradition. Indeed, the delivery of the one-liner ranks among the most cherished rites of this ritualistic genre. Whether a quip, catchphrase, or callback to an earlier installment in a franchise, one-liners, even at their corniest, provoke the same glee as the most pyrotastic action sequences.

Many one-liners are bad, if treasured, puns (Arnold put his stamp on "You're fired" long before Donald did). Others display a wit that we might grudgingly concede ("Barbeque, huh? How do you like your ribs?"). The one-liner is also remarkably versatile. It spans the grandiose ("I'm going to show you God does exist"; "I'm your worst nightmare") to the minimalist ("Get off my plane"; "Whoah"). It ranges from the functional ("Dead or alive, you're coming with me") to the iconic ("Go ahead … make my day"). And while some are uninspired ("It's time to die"), others are absurd ("I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass—and I'm all out of bubble gum"), self-referential ("No sequel for you"), and sardonic ("Go ahead … I don't shop here").

The 1980s were the golden age of the one-liner, with the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Clint Eastwood, and the ascension of such screenwriters as Steven E. de Souza and Shane Black, who penned many of the decade's high-concept action and buddy movies (Die Hard, Commando, and Lethal Weapon chief among them). Yet, like many action film conventions, the one-liner has roots in other genres. In the landmark Western The Searchers (1956), John Wayne growled, "That'll be the day," prompting Buddy Holly to immortalize the catchphrase in a hit single the following year. And not only did the James Bond franchise give us "Bond—James Bond," but lines such as "Shocking! Positively shocking!"; "He had to fly"; and "He got the boot" prove that Bond also gave action films their penchant for punning. Throughout the series, Bond's cheeky dialogue defuses the emotion of a given scene, just as the one-liner does throughout the action genre.

Such glibness lays bare the action hero's core reticence. "I ain't got time to bleed," insists Predator's Jesse Ventura, who would repurpose the line for the title of his book, I Ain't Got Time To Bleed: Reworking the Body Politic From the Bottom Up. Less quoted but even more germane is the declaration by Road House's Patrick Swayze, "Pain don't hurt." A contradiction, yes, but one that defines both the action hero and, more literally, one of the genre's most iconic roles: the title character of The Terminator.

That 1984 movie inaugurated Arnold Schwarzenegger's signature, "I'll be back." In this case, the one-liner is funny only in hindsight, as the cyborg comes right back, fully armed and with a pickup-truck-of-mass-destruction to boot. Reversing the typical action-sequence structure, the quip is the set-up, the violence is the punch line. There is nothing especially remarkable about "I'll be back" (it is not, after all, Cobra's "You're the disease, and I'm the cure," a line noted by the press six months before the film's 1986 opening). Even so, "I'll be back" distills the action movie's ritualistic appeal. The pleasure of hearing it said from movie to movie is the same as hearing a story told time after time.

Most one-liners articulate the hero's self-regard (or in Harry Callahan's case, regard for his .44 Magnum), and why shouldn't they? The action genre is primarily an exercise in hero-worship. But Die Hard's wisecrack is remarkable for how it refers not to one hero but to a tradition of heroism. It is a line born of pride, not of ego.

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Eric Lichtenfeld is the author of Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie. He blogs at www.reactionshot.blogspot.com.

Illustration by Deanna Staffo.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

The "Die Hard" line is a good one, but for my money the all-time greatest comes in "The Outlaw Josey Wales." Wales--- played, of course, by Clint Eastwood--- is drinking in a decrepit, dimly lit bar when a fellow patron recognizes him. The young man leaves at first but returns to confront him. "We don't have to do this, son," Clint intones, but the punk will have none of it. He knows there's a bounty on Wales's head and he wants the money. "I'm just tryin' to make a living," he says. Clint's reply? "Dyin' ain't much of a livin', boy." The he shoots the kid through the heart.

Eastwood's intonation--- quiet, matter-of-fact, utterly calm--- makes this perhaps the most perfectly delivered line in cinematic history.

--Malone

(To reply, click here.)

Call me old fashioned, but I think Lichtenfeld should show more respect for Clint Eastwood's "Make my day." Even though I never saw Sudden Impact, the Dirty Harry movie it was uttered in--I only saw the trailer--I rank "Make my day" as the greatest action flick one-liner of all time. Admittedly, in the quarter-century since its introduction "Make my day" has lost much of its freshness, and the phrase was sullied by Ronald Reagan when he used it to threaten veto of a tax increase in 1985. But there's a reason Reagan and various others co-opted "Make my day." It was and remains a small masterpiece of economy.

Imagine a tough cop saying to some violent punk, "You're doing me a favor by forcing me to act in self-defense because I will actually enjoy killing you, something I wouldn't have the opportunity to do otherwise, given the rules imposed by the law and by my profession, not to mention the ethical consensus imposed less formally by civilized society--rules that I am compelled, grudgingly, to obey." Kind of a mouthful, right? "Make my day" communicates all this in a three-word Haiku. As a bonus, those three words perfectly express the uniquely warped psyche of the Dirty Harry character. Yes, "Make my day" is an expression of individual derangement and egomania rather than a summing-up of the collective American mythology. So what? This is an action movie we're talking about, not some damned folk song.

Compared to "Make my day," "Yippee Ki-Yi-Yay motherfucker" is downright loquacious, and action movie heroes are supposed to say as few words as is humanly possible. It's also less exuberantly fascistic, and let's face it, we don't exactly want our action movie heroes to be card-carrying members of the ACLU. "Yippee Ki-Yi-Yay motherfucker" is "Make my day" with the pathology washed out of it, and where's the fun in that?

--Timothy Noah

(To reply, click here.)

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