For one thing, Hollywood doesn’t make many comedies anymore, and when it does, the movies don’t necessarily get an audience big enough to shift our collective habits. You’ll notice there aren’t a lot of examples from recent years.

Others grabbed our attention with a single snippet of dialogue. Some comedies, such as “Clueless,” have copious lines to choose from. Looking back at the past 40 years, we picked 40 movies that changed the way we talk, and selected some of the most-repeated quotes. A lot of others had us mimicking characters without even thinking about it, to the point that it became second nature to not just say “great success,” but to say it in a faux-Kazakh accent, just the way Borat does. It’s not the only comedy with pithy, repeatable dialogue that weaseled its way into our vernacular so completely that we started to forget about the source. In the mid-1990s, suddenly every teen was dishing out a blase “whatever” when they weren’t totally buggin’ or Audi. “Clueless,” for example, influenced the way an entire generation of kids talked. Some movies have a way of infiltrating our everyday conversations.

Why didnt anyone tell me meme