Background on Informant:

My informant is a friend I went to high school with, who would be considered a millennial. He is in his mid-thirties, works as a longshoreman, and spends a lot of his free time playing video games. He is also a fan of The Office. Since high school, he has regularly used a phrase that can turn an ordinary sentence into a sexual one, commonly known as “that’s what she said.”

Text:

Interviewer: Alright,  so you have been saying that’s what she said since high school. Where did you hear it first, and what does it mean?

Informant: *laughs* It’s just when someone says something normal and you turn it into something sexual, like if someone says this is really hard, you just go, that’s what she said.

Interviewer: Where did you hear it first?

Informant: The Office….. or school, but I know that the Office definitely made it stick.

Interviewer: So you heard it a lot in school too?

Informant: Oh yeah in the early 2000’s everyone was saying it.

Interviewer: Do you still use it a lot?

Informant: Yeah, its almost like an addiction now, if I hear anything even remotely sexual, its like a compulsion at this point.

Interviewer: Do you still hear other people say it?

Informant: Yeah, but not nearly as much, now when someone else says it, I get excited, *chuckles* like we are long lost family or something.

Interviewer: So when someone else knows your phrase or joke you get excited?

Informant: Yeah, its like we are on the same team or something.

Analysis:

This joke or phrase is verbal folklore that relies on shared cultural knowledge. The Main group for this phrase is millennials, as it became widely popular through the hit television show The Office, although that is not its origin. The show made it more popular and then it was repeated and shared through peer-to-peer or horizontal transmission. He describes the phrase as a compulsion, like an itch he must scratch, this demonstrates how repeated use of folkloric terms can embed themselves into regular speech. The joke relies on timing and capitalizing on the opportunity to turn a simple sentence into a sexual one. He mentioned that when he hears someone else say it, he gets excited, which shows how the phrase causes a sense of connection or cohesion within the folkloric group. Although it isn’t used as much, it still holds meaning within the groups that still use it. This is a really great example of how something that started mass marketed ended up working its way into a small niche group of people who now use it.