Well, I said the next time I wrote it would be post-holiday, but whatever. I’m not going to Athens until March, which is ages away, and I want to write something.
Alright!
I don’t really know what Substack is, but several months ago my friend Katryna told me she’d made a profile on it and that I should too. I made one: I followed a couple of accounts that seemed interesting – and then closed the app and never opened it again until Sunday just gone. I’m crap with social media and technology, but I figure that, as a writer who wants to eventually become a more well-known writer, I really ought to take a more active interest in these things.
I pulled up a Youtube video explaining how it all works. I watched ten minutes, understood very little, and closed the video. Hello, attention deficit. To hell with it, I’ll just figure it out as I go, I decided, which is what I always decide when I’m overwhelmed with information. I’d be the first guy sniped in No Man’s Land – glazing over during the mission briefing and just sauntering out into a hail of gunfire. “I said DON’T go before my whistle!”
Opening Substack again and pawing around a few menus, I found Katryna’s profile. She’d published something only four days ago. You bugger, I thought; we usually send our stuff to each other. Kat’s a smart cookie. She writes well – really well, so well that it often makes me realise I’ve got work to do. Which is good!
Her essay was about how the pop culture we imbibe becomes part of our personality – Kat describes it as similar to passive smoking. You don’t mean to take it in, but if you spend enough time around it, it becomes you. All the films and TV shows you watch, the songs, the places, the people – you take something from all of them, whether it be a turn of phrase, a mannerism, or a way of dressing. Our personalities are made up of tens of thousands of these little moments. Some of them we share: my brothers and I speak in a language of references and niche quotes from our childhoods that can easily become indecipherable to a fourth party – even to our own mum, at times. And other references we keep just for us. You make a joke, quoting a cartoon you watched when you were five years old. Nobody realises it even was a joke – nobody has the reference point.
At the end of Kat’s article, she put out a suggestion: that her friends create for her a dictionary of themselves, containing these reference points. I thought it seemed like a very beautiful idea. So here’s mine – The Dictionary of Dan. Or at least, a little glimpse of it.
1. “I’m surrounded by idiots.”
Scar says this, in the Lion King. And it’s not the line that’s funny – it’s how he says it. Emphasis on ‘surrounded’. Jeremy Irons’ bored, irritated yet lavish delivery of his lines in this film has left a permanent mark on my brothers and I. Twenty five years later, we still use this cadence with each other.
2. Aragorn, opening those doors.
I will never, for the rest of my life, open a pair of double doors without thinking of Aragorn shoving open the doors to Helms Deep in slow motion – the lank hair, the sheen of sweat, the combative expression, the casual hand lain on the pommel of his sword as the doors swing away – as a kid I was absolutely fascinated at how such an everyday action could be made to look fucking godly. I still am.
See also: Jack Sparrow stepping off the sinking pirate ship / me stepping off an escalator. Every damn time.
3. “Hagriiiiiiid!”
Chamber of Secrets. In a magical flashback, Harry sees a young Hagrid framed for a crime. As the memory begins to fade and Harry is dragged backwards through the portal, he extends a hand and shouts a very long, very emotionless ‘Hagrid’, stretched out in slow motion. The fact that Harry slides backwards from the screen while yelling this as though on a conveyor belt always tickled my brothers and I. We often reference this scene when one of us has had an exceedingly dramatic occurrence, or been dragged away from something against our will (an unfinished pint, say).
4. Brad Pitt’s legs
In Fight Club, there’s a scene where Brad Pitt gets beaten up then goes to sit in a chair, crossing one leg over the other. Except, he doesn’t just sit, raise one leg and rest it on the other one – he actually picks up his leg with his hands, as though it’s unable to move by itself, and drops it over his other leg. I was always delighted by this – such a simple, ridiculous way of sitting down, and indicating a character is exhausted but still retains their spark. I still do this action from time to time, when I’m very tired.
5. “You bastard!”
John Cleese in Monty Python. Bastard is the funniest swear word, by far. It’s such a fantastic sound, plosive and archaic; it smacks of Old England and regality. In the north we would pronounce it with the ‘a’ sound from the word ‘catch’, but for my family and I, when we are faux-annoyed with one another, the southern version (with the long ‘ar’ sound) is much funnier. It’s so pompous and indignant, so impossibly outraged. People fighting in lumps in the street on a Saturday night will call each other twats and dick heads, but never bastards – it’s far too silly. The fight would end immediately.
See also: Mark and Jez in Peep Show. “You’re such a bastard.” I just love it.
6. “He’s going to tell!”
I could spend this whole article just writing about Python references, to be honest. My grandad introduced me to it when I was 10 or so – the Black Knight losing all his limbs. I was absolutely floored by the slapstick. It was as though a group of grown-ups had taken all the silliest ideas from my weekend outdoor adventures with my friends and made them into a whole movie. I’d never before seen adults acting like that – so goofy, so hysterically whimsical and carelessly infantile. It changed my brain chemistry in an instant.
This particular phrase – He’s going to tell! – is sung in an irritating pantomime-style chant by a group of peasants in a castle, after the baron’s irritating son survives plunging out of a tall tower and comes back to tell the tale. The peasants crouch and dance around the miraculously-unharmed son, clicking their fingers while a lame trumpet ramps up to begin the song – all while the father runs around telling everyone to knock it off.
My brothers chant this at me when I’m too eager to tell a story and they want to wind me up (it works every single time).
7. Cook’s Harrington
As a teenager I stayed up late once a week to watch Skins. I never saw the first two seasons; I was too young. But season three blew my socks off. I loved Cook’s character, and for a long time in my teens I (inadvisedly) sought to emulate him. In one episode, he wears a red Harrington jacket. I’d never seen such a jacket before. I fell in love with it – the fit of it, tight at the waist with broad shoulders and a permanently popped collar.
8. James Dean’s Harrington
One evening, while Googling Cook’s Harrington to see where I could buy one (I ended up buying the exact same red one, and wore it to every party and festival for the next few years – I still own a blue one), I read an article from the stylist for the cast of Skins. She talked about how she chose Cook’s jacket as a nod to James Dean’s red Harrington in Rebel Without A Cause. I’d never heard of it, or him. And so began my James Dean phase: a not-entirely-unhomoerotic fascination with the 50s icon. I tried to style my hair like him, and I spent a long time looking in the mirror at the age of 21, trying to nail his world-weary smoulder (never could quite get it right).
9. In fact, while we’re on jackets – Arthur Morgan’s jacket
Is it lame to buy a jacket because you like the one that a video game character wears? Is it? It is, you say? Bah, well then I’m lame. I like Arthur Morgan very much. I like his jacket too. And so I bought one that looks a bit like it: my Carhartt jacket, beige with a brown collar. I wear it, arguably, too much; I have no other clothes I like half as much.
10. “How dare you!”
I don’t even know where this originated. Catherine Tate, maybe? How very dare you. Much like ‘you barrrstard’, I love the pomposity of it, the holier-than-thou disbelief. It’s pretty much my go-to retort to any friendly insult (saves me having to think of a witty retort). For added spice, I also very much enjoy the nonsensical variant: How absolutely dare you?
11. “Hello!”
Mrs Doubfire – when she’s wearing a facemask made of cake icing and pops up from behind the fridge door, shortly before setting her boobs on fire. My family love Mrs Doubtfire. I could write a whole list of phrases taken from that one film alone that we quote on the daily. The cadence of this particular ‘hello’ – emphasis on the second syllable, high-pitched, barely concealed mania – is something I use all the time to greet friends.
12. “Sheeit.”
At the end of Blink 182’s album Cheshire Cat, there’s a ridiculous, seemingly made-up-on-the-spot song about urinating oneself, called Depends. I love this song because it sounds uncannily like the practice sessions of my old band, Sex Rain (we were 14 years old when we made the name). At the end of Depends, there’s about a minute of random chatter and silliness, at the end of which Mark Hoppus makes a long, strange speech that finishes with ‘sheeit’. Fun fact: he’s actually quoting the jive speech scene from the film Airplane. I use it myself to this day.
13. Jack Kerouac’s head tilt
There’s a video on Youtube of Jack Kerouac being interviewed and reading a passage from On The Road. When the interviewer makes a lame joke, Kerouac doesn’t fake laugh; instead he tilts his head to one side and half-smiles. I must have some sort of male charisma fixation – because again, I found myself emulating the head tilt more and more.
14. “You’re all rotters and I hate you.”
Stephen Fry said this once on QI, after the panel teased him at length about his struggle to finish reading the line ‘They say of the Acropolis where the Parthenon is…” Still makes me laugh today.
15. “I hate you.”
Actually, there’s another fantastic delivery of ‘I hate you’ that I enjoy perhaps even more: Ralph Fiennes’ character in The Grand Budapest Hotel. He says it when he’s dangling off a cliff, in a last angry rant at the man trying very hard to stamp on his fingers. I love his slightly effeminate enunciation; imagine still making the effort to pronounce your Ts so perfectly while seconds from death.
16. “He sounds like a most frightful… shit.”
And so began my long love affair with using swear words where they don’t quite belong – or better yet, substituting softer words where you’d usually expect a swear word. What’s funnier that the phrase ‘he slipped and fell arse over tit’? He fell legs over bosoms. Ugh. It just tickles me. The ‘frightful shit’ line comes from Bridget Jones – the second one I think. I remember it making my mum laugh years ago.
Interlude: why are so many of my pop culture references related to swearing? And why are they all from men? I am perplexed. I suppose the easiest answer is that I’m a man who just really enjoys swearing.
17. “I think my hair just didn’t have its usual ice punch.”
Not a pop culture reference; this one came from my friend Annie. I never use this line, obviously, but it meant a lot to me at the time. I’d had a very lonely year in London in 2021. I didn’t have many friends, and a lot of my conversations with my then-flatmates were just a bit… drab. Then Annie came to visit me for a week, and on the first day, as we caught up in a beer garden and she was talking about peroxiding her hair, she came out with the line above. Such casual poetry meant the world to me: that my friend, with her weird phrasing, was back in town. Hearing it felt like the first sign that I could be saved – that my life wasn’t going to be all windswept and barren from here on out. My friend lived far away, but here she was – in all her colour. Life was about to be exciting again.
18. “I don’t know.”
The Simpsons. Homer rings up the bank pretending to be Mr Burns. When the teller asks him his first name, Homer answers ‘I don’t know’ with such a ridiculous cadence that it stuck in my head for years. I love how the delivery of such a totally normal line can turn it instantly into a memory. I use this almost daily. Bizarrely, a friend of mine actually commented on it a few months ago, after the barman offered me the choice of two IPAs I’d never heard of. “It sounds so funny when you say ‘I don’t know’ like that, man.” Little does he know I’m quoting Homer.
19. “They call me the hiphoppapotamus, flows that glow like phosphorus, poppin’ off the top of this esophagus, rockin’ this metropolis / I’m not a large water-dwelling mammal, where did you get that preposterous hypothesis? / Did Steve tell you that, perchance? Hmm, Steve.”
Flight of the Conchords, baby! I watched it for the first time when I was 20 years old, staying with my uncle in London for two weeks doing work experience at his then-office, Casual Films. He introduced me to the show and I loved it. The above lyrics are from a rap scene which I found very funny. I spent a good amount of time learning to recite it off the dome, for no real reason.
20. “I’m in the middle of Little Italy.”
Speaking of rap, this is a throwaway line in You Oughta Know by Das Racist. I just love the flow of it – I love how, when you read it out loud in an American accent, your tongue has to make so many ‘iddle-iddle-iddle’ flips in a row that it feels like you’re either having a stroke, or suddenly fluent in Elvish. I told Annie about this line when we were in Lisbon in 2023. We spent the rest of the day adding to it, making it as long and difficult as we could: I’m getting litty with Lily in the middle of Little Italy. Still makes me smile to think about.
21. “Swarm out in your millions.”
My grandad used to (and still does) say this to my brothers and I when we were getting out of the car, or leaving their house. The fact that there were only three of us, and thereby constituted a swarm of millions, has always seemed very very funny to me. I look forward to saying it to my own kids, one day.
Ahh. I could go on (and want to), but for your sake, my beautiful reader, I’ll finish here for now. I might add more in a few days – perchance. I don’t know.