Slowly, I’ve become aware that this has attained a sort-of underground catchphrase status. When I ran a treasure hunt earlier this year, one of the students accidentally broke part of the treasure chest I was using as a prop — nothing I couldn’t fix quickly, but he was chagrined. And his teammate immediately said “This is why we can’t have nice things,” with such a concentration of irony that you could almost hear the quotation marks.
But what was he quoting? Does this phrase originate somewhere? Anybody know?
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No doubt he was quoting his mother after he broke the cookie jar, or slammed a door or spilled his milk. It’s one of those stock phrases of the universal guilt-inflicting mother. I certainly heard it from my mom, and she is now 90. I expect she heard it from her own mom.
This seems like asking where “Don’t look at me in that tone of voice” comes from — it’s just a parent-ism from way back when, right?
Huh. I guess that’s one parentism I was spared — I honestly had never heard it, up to the moment when I started hearing it everywhere.
When I hear that quote, I think of the Simpsons. In a certain episode (can’t remember which), Lisa said “This is why I can’t have nice things” when Bart or Homer broke something of her’s.
Gotta go with the Simpsons as well because I can’t recall ever hearing it anywhere else: http://www.snpp.com/episodes/CABF14
Upon further reflection, I think the first time I heard it (or was conscious of hearing it, anyway) was an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. The beneficiary in that episode was quite nearly beyond help — simultaneously clueless and overly self-conscious. In preparing to meet his girlfriend’s parents, perhaps for the first time, he made a botch of nearly everything his gay mentors had instructed him to do. This culminated in his sweeping his brand-new barware off the kitchen counter with a careless arm, after which he said “This is why I can’t have nice things!” with genuine self-pity — no way was he quoting someone or using the phrase ironically. If the phrase hadn’t been in existence, he’d have coined it on the spot.
I recalled this episode shortly after making this post initially, and after remembering it, I would not have been surprised if someone here had commented, “Well, it all started on this disasterous episode of Queer Eye…“
That was “Alan,” and that was the first episode of QE I watched. I remember calling you and saying, “I watched Queer Eye and they failed.”
That’s also the first episode I ever watched, and it’s the one that hooked me. That moment, of him sweeping the broken stuff off the floor and damning himself under his breath, was some of the best TV I’ve ever seen. What a mess.
The “tiwwchnt” phrase has been around for generations.
Right, the phrase has been around forever. I couldn’t possibly tell you where I first heard it (not from my parents), because it’s just one of those phrases everyone uses–well, almost everyone, I guess. This long predates Queer Eye, and I’m quite certain the poor schlep didn’t make it up. Don’t forget that often-used “just,” though: “We just can’t have nice things.”
Now, see, I’ve never heard it said that way. I’m telling you, there’s a research paper in here somewhere for some eager linguistics major.
Toonhead will attribute anything to the Simpsons, won’t he? From Paula Poundstone in 2000: “My mother was the angriest person I’ve ever known in my entire life. One time I knocked a Flintstones glass off the kitchen table. She said, ‘Well, damn it, we can’t have nice things.’”
(Cited in a 2001 LA Times article.)
So Poundstone’s quote at the very least predates the Simpsons, and if her mother did indeed say it, it predates the Simpsons by decades. Which is my intuition: that Poundstone was playing off a familiar phrase.
I swear I’ve heard it on a popular series.. none mentioned above… maybe Will & Grace?
Either way it’s a classic. Just one of those kind of ‘jokingly’ used quotes you hear.
I have actually not started hearing it till just a few months back and I thought it was some quote from a movie, too…
I heard it from my old roomate, so he started it. He was also a big Simpsons buff fwiw.
it’s a meme
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/This_is_why_we_can%27t_have_nice_things
First time I heard it was in 1996 in Mystery Science Theater 3000 the movie.
err, I just got led here by a google search, but I think I should probably share that it has become very popular on the internet, usually said to people who ruin jokes, warn people about pranks, or otherwise get in the way of “good things”. I’m sure that it takes no stretch of the imagination to assume that teenagers brought it over to offline conversation.
Hope that I helped…
yeah, I came here from a google search for the phrase after hearing it loads recently.It is definatly a very old phrase and I think parentism is acurate but I dont know what has caused its recent popularity. I know (to my shame) that it is commonly used on the /b/ board at 4chan and I think it may have started there in reference to how they scared off their ‘queen’ Boxxy by obsesing over her until it started to ruin her life a bit and she was never to be seen again.
I definitely heard it in an early episode of Third Rock from The Sun (first series, I’m sure). The actor who plays Harry uses it but in an ironic way.
It’s also used in the 2000 episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, season 5, episode 6, “The Author”, after Ray and Robert get into a fight in their mother’s house. Marie, their mother, and after a short discussion comes in and uses the line, with such a reaction from the studio audience that it must already be a pre-existing phrase.
holy shit thank you lardboy….i was looking for hours trying to find out where i heard it, and it was everybody loves raymond def.
In my house we had a variation of that: “You broke a drinking glass! Now we have to go out and buy another jar of jelly!”
The first time I heard the quote was from Babylon-5, where Zathras was unhappy that the time stabilizer was broken, and he lamented that Zathras can never have nice things. (He always spoke in the 3rd person)