Just the Facts

Joe Friday was a no-nonsense detective on the TV show Dragnet. I remember watching reruns while growing up, and admiring the way his unflappable character always wanted to cut to the chase.

He had that one catchphrase he said all the time:

Joe would bust this out whenever a witness was diving into personal details when describing a crime. He just wanted to know what had happened, not the witness’s life story.

I remember hearing this phrase a thousand times, and I remember middle school friends who would imitate Joe’s voice and dry tone. The only problem is that this never happened.

Joe Friday’s actual catchphrase was more varied, and it included phrases like all we want are the facts, ma’am, or all we know are the facts.

It seems I had my facts screwed up.

What’s going on here, though? Before this morning, I would have sworn that Joe’s phrase was just the facts, but he never actually said this on the show.

This is a little bit like mondegreens, those misheard lyrics like there’s a bathroom on the right, but that’s not quite right either. The thing Joe Friday never said is something everyone seems to remember.

It’s much more like the Berenstain Bears, who everyone seems to remember as Berenstein Bears. This now has a name, thanks to the internet: the Berenstain Bears Effect.

Luke, I am your father!

…is something Darth Vader never actually said. You probably know that already if you’re a Star Wars nerd, but if not, here’s the original scene so you can hear it for yourself:

It’s doubly ironic that I wanted to write today about Joe Friday’s falsely remembered catch phrase. I wanted to point out that, in spite of Joe’s integrity as presented on the show—despite his noble efforts—relying on someone’s memory isn’t exactly the same as relying on facts.

I mean, I certainly remembered it that way.

Now, as to why everyone seems to think just the facts is correct?

The thing is that Dragnet was already ancient by the time I got to see it on TV. The reruns I watched during the 80s were from the original run of the show that ran from 1967 until 1970, but there was an even earlier version of Dragnet from the 50s that inspired the reboots I watched.

Even the 1951 TV show wasn’t the first Dragnet. That was a radio show that began in 1947, around the same time when my parents were born. This radio show was popular enough to get about 10 million regular listeners, but the TV show was even more successful, peaking near 30 million viewers toward the end of its run.

Enter Stan Freberg, a comedian who specialized in satire. In 1953, he released a record called St. George and the Dragonet, poking fun at Joe Friday’s robotic characterization in a medieval fantasy setting.

In the record, Freberg uses the line “I just want to get to the facts, ma’am” early on, and then “Just the facts, ma’am” later in the record. This record sold over a million copies, essentially making it roughly akin to a Weird Al parody in terms of popularity.

The collective memory of popular culture took care of the rest.

Oh! There was another Dragnet that was (kind of) important to my life, too. In 1987, a full length movie starring Dan Ackroyd and Tom Hanks paid tribute to the long running franchise. I remember being delighted by this when it came out. Here, Ackroyd really does use the just the facts phrase:

Now, those really are the facts.