< Wham! Line

Wham! Line/Real Life

  • Any time this exchange takes place:

Person A: Turn on the TV!
Person B: Sure, what channel?
Person A: Any channel!

Fred Thompson: "Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?[1]

    • "Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office."

Swigert (CMP): Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here.
CAPCOM Jack Lousma (CC): This is Houston. Say again, please.
Lovell (CDR): Uh, Houston, we've had a problem.

Tim Mccarver: ...and he fails to get Dave Parker at second base, so the A's take-

  • static*

Al Michaels: I tell you what, we're having an earth-

  • I wonder if I was ever or still was considered a suspect in her murder, because I think sometimes I should've been.
  • "General Lee, I have no division."
  • "We're gonna be in the Hudson."
  • "The lights are going out all over Europe. They will not be seen again in our lifetime."
  • For Augustus of Ancient Rome, whoever delivered the news that Varus and his three legions had been annihilated in the Teutoburger Wald.
    • While on the subject of Ancient Rome, I believe "The die is cast," is probably the premier example of an ancient historical wham line. Julius Caesar uttered it as he violated Roman law, bringing his legion across the Rubicon and into Rome...and thus died the Roman Republic.
  • In World War II, when France was being invaded by Germany, Winston Churchill went to Paris and on a meeting with the commanders, asked the leading general, Gamelin: "Where is the strategic reserve?" Gamelin answered: "There is none." Churchill described hearing this later as the single most shocking moment in his life.
  • 1972 Olympic games in Munich: "They’ve now said that there were eleven hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning. Nine...were killed at the airport tonight. They’re all gone." What's so chilling is the way Jim Mckay emphasizes and pauses after the word "nine." The world knew they were all dead a second before he actually said they were. If ever there was a Wham Word, it was Jim Mckay's "nine."
  • "Today, June 22th 1941, without declaring war, Hitlerite Germany invaded the Soviet Union."
    • "I have to tell you now that no such action has been taken and consequently, this country is at war with Germany".
  • Monday Night Football on Dec. 8th, 1980. Just another game until right at the end, when Howard Cosell dropped a bombshell on the audience:

We have to say it. Remember, this is just a football game, no matter who wins or loses. An unspeakable tragedy, confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City: John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the west side of New York City, the most famous perhaps of all of The Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital, dead on arrival.

Bradass87: hypothetical question: if you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time… say, 8-9 months… and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do?

"Mr. Menendez, did you know that Big 5 stopped carrying handguns in March of 1986?"

Joseph Welch: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

"No, no. This is tragic. You don’t understand. Gower Champion died this morning."

  1. ↑ Thompson already knew the answer would be in the affirmative, as Butterfield had told the committee staff that already. But the viewing public didn't know, and the question seemed out of left field
  2. ↑ While well-known, actually a more accessible paraphrase. The real line was more like "Let w be the predicate: to be a predicate that cannot be predicated of itself. Can w be predicated of itself? From each answer its opposite follows. Therefore we must conclude that w is not a predicate."
  3. ↑ Basically, it's an encoded form of "This statement is not provable in such-and-such theory". You can add that to the theory's axioms and create a new theory, but then there's an encoded form of "This statement is not provable in the new theory", and so on ad infinitum.
  4. ↑ East Germany and West Germany
  5. ↑ The reader already knows this, but the shepherds didn't
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