Up is down, dogs and cats living together

Whenever something threatens to go mildly wrong in work or life I find this incoherent tumble of words on the tip of my tongue. Some variant of

'up is down, left is right, dogs and cats living together, world turned upside down, we're through the looking glass people'.

Sometimes I say it out loud, and people who know me obviously find this very amusing. Obviously.

I said it the other day and was called on what on earth I was talking about. I didn't know.

So I thought I'd look into where I might have picked up all these phrases.

Up is down, black is white

Some version of this occurs all over popular culture. Many of these are, presumably, cross-referring each other.

There's Millers Crossing:

Watch ‘Up is down, black is white.’ | Miller’s Crossing Clip

Watch the clip ‘Up is down, black is white.’ from the movie Miller\’s Crossing on Clip.Cafe. Eddie Dane: Up is down, black is white.

Clip.Cafe

There's Bunk, in the The Wire "up is down, black is white... left is right."

There's Pirates of the Caribbean, Eminem, The Punisher, Family Guy.

And though it's the kind of thing that could have arisen spontaneously many times, I suspect loads of these were inspired by the lyrics of The Kinks:

"East is West, left is right / Up is down, and black is white / Inside-out, wrong is right / It's back to front and I'm all uptight"

Knowing my media habits, and the tone in which it sits in my head, I probably caught it from George in Seinfeld, when he's doing The Opposite.

Dogs and cats living together

This is more obvious (though I didn't remember). It's from Ghostbusters and it's got that apocalyptic end-of-the-world tone:

World turned upside down

I undoubtedly got this from Billy Bragg, his version being the most popular one. I imagined, when I looked at the lyrics, that all the up-is-down stuff would be in there. But not at all. Memory eh.

(Small, incidental thing: the producer of the first couple of Bragg albums was, apparently Ted de Bono, also known as Edward. And Genius, in it's internet majesty, has mistakenly illustrated his page with a picture of Edward De Bono - the inventor of lateral thinking. I'm looking forward to that being true in an AI world.)

We're through the looking glass people

I bet I got this from Danny Baker. He used to say it a lot. He probably got it from JFK:

Or maybe The Simpsons:

I wonder if any of this got connected in my head because Mark Fisher once described Danny Baker as "The carnival king of a world turned upside down". I was probably reading K-PUNK religiously around then.

Anyway. Now we know.