Guide to Quoting Movies Socially

1. The Bad Habit.

It’s a bad habit. You could better spend your time talking in adult tones about real life things, or if you’re with your buds, you could do some original jamming-on-real-life-thing riffs that nobody wrote, directed, or produced.

Quoting movies is a bad idea like ironic t-shirts are a bad idea. Sure, they give everybody an idea of your sense of humor, and maybe you get some smiles and laughs out of it, but at the end of day you’re no closer to anybody than when you started. They both have a distancing effect. And also there’s a precious oneupsmanship about the whole thing that’s kind of yucky, like “hey, look what obscure trivial thing I remember about Punky Brewster, aren’t I great?” People who quote movies and wear ironic t-shirts are imminently punchable.

But that said, once you’ve reached a point with people that you don’t care about that stuff, you’re fine. Just know that it’s a bad habit before moving on, like smoking.

2. Girls with girls and guys with guys.

Quoting movies socially is one of the great gender barriers that still exists. If you’ve ever ripped off a quick reference to The Jerk and whatever girl you’re with gives you the “what’s wrong with you?” face while you’re there mugging with the post-quote “hey, The Jerk, right?” face, then you know the burn of busting out movie quotes across gender lines.

I don’t know if girls quote girl movies together in their all-girl friend groups, but I’m willing to bet that they do. That’s probably what they do when they go to the bathroom together; they rifle through every single line of dialogue from The Legend of Billie Jean and then come back to the table glowing like they just shared a hilarious secret in order to fuck with your stupid boy head. Actually, now that I think about it, this could be the most positive thing to come from Juno. It’s the girl quote movie.

But girls are smart about social things so they don’t just say “fair’s fair!” and then get that look on their face like, “Come on! The Legend of Billie Jean!” like how boys do. They’ll maybe let it slip if there are more than three other girls there and they’ve been hanging out together before you got there, but if they do that it’s just to get a laugh out of the other girls who are there, which for sure means that they don’t want to have sex with you and they’d rather you leave them alone so they can have girl’s night out and continue to quote Juno in peace. You have to know when you’re being punked.

Girls only do cross-gender movie quotes if they want your penis to wither, or maybe sometimes if they’re that “just one of the guys” type of girl who makes you kind of sad because if she had a little more self-respect she’d be hanging out with other girls instead of you and your loser friends eating Doritos and quoting Caddyshack on Friday night.

So take your cue from girls, who are smarter than dudes about this type of thing. Quoting movies across gender lines means nobody is getting laid. Which is fine, but if you want to leave that possibility open for yourself, then don’t quote movies around the opposite sex.

I don not know how gay people do this. I don’t think they have a problem with anything other than the government.

3. Know when to say when.

Even if you just watched a movie together and you and your friends loved it to death and all you want to do is go play darts together and quote Borat all night long, then fight the urge. First of all: getting laid is totally out the window because you’re now a circle of dudes playing darts and yelling “den one day he break out of his cage, and he GET dis” whenever there’s a score change. Actually, that sounds like fun and that’s fine. Don’t fight that urge.

But still, there will come a time when overquoting becomes unfun and turns both the night and the movie you loved into kind of a drag. Like when that one dude who sort of tagged along keeps saying “we support your war of terror” while the dart game has dragged into a bullseye-off and people are looking at their cell phones and thinking about where they have to be tomorrow before they decide whether or not to get another beer, and people are seriously thinking about leaving even though it’s not even midnight. And you can’t really blame them for it.

I’m just sayin’. You don’t want to be an overquoter. Err on the side of conservatism.

4. Who cares?

And if you just saw a movie and you can’t get it out of your head and the quotes just keep falling out of your mouth and you can’t stop it, then don’t worry. Just go into the “who cares” zone and have a good time. The funny thing about fun is that there’s a lot of different kinds of it, and sometimes whatever you’re doing is fun to you even though (and sometimes because) it’s not funny to other people. Doesn’t necessarily mean you’re always objectively a drag to be around, although with movie quotes, it’s definitely a bad habit.

So if that’s just what you’re up to that night, go on quoting Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and either bore the crap out of everybody or pal around with a bunch of other idiots who also want to do that.

Or both.

I don’t know.