Adam and Eve painting with caption 'But God, she won't even make me a sandwich'

Make Me a Sandwich

1995catchphraseclassic

Published September 5, 2026

"Make Me a Sandwich," often spelled "sammich," is a catchphrase that started on late-90s American TV and went online as a sexist deflection aimed at women in tech and gaming spaces. A 2006 xkcd strip pairing the line with the Unix command sudo turned it into a defining piece of geek humor and a lightning rod for debates about misogyny on the internet.

catchphrase memes gender stereotype memes tech humor memes webcomic memes late 2000s memes

Overview

"Make Me a Sandwich," and the deliberately misspelled variant "Make Me a Sammich," is a dismissive one-liner most often aimed at women who show up in gaming lobbies, comment threads or tech forums3. The joke leans on the old "a woman's place is in the kitchen" bit, delivered as a fake command rather than an argument, which is what makes it both a shutdown and a running gag among the guys deploying it.

Online, the line took on a second life as programmer humor once xkcd tied it to the Unix `sudo` prefix2. That version, "sudo make me a sandwich," reframed the phrase as a joke about permissions and stubborn machines instead of gender, and it is the reading you are most likely to see quoted on Linux forums and T-shirts today4.

Origin & Background

Platform
TV (Saturday Night Live) / xkcd (viral spread)
Key People
Tim Meadows, Randall Munroe
Date
1995

The catchphrase traces back to a Saturday Night Live sketch that aired on December 16, 1995, in which Tim Meadows played swaggering weatherman John-John Mackey, who tells an incoming storm, "That's right, bitch! Now, go make me a sandwich!"1. The "sammich" spelling followed later, popularized by a November 1998 article in The Onion written in exaggerated office-worker slang3.

Definitional entries piled up over the next decade. Urban Dictionary logged a "sammich" entry in January 2003 describing it as a sandwich "with connotations of extra goodness," and later added a straightforward "Make Me a Sandwich" entry framing the phrase as "a request by an impolite hungry person"5.

How It Spread

The phrase kept showing up on American TV through the late 1990s and 2000s, including a March 1999 episode of The X-Files, a July 2000 episode of That '70s Show, and Dave Chappelle's September 2004 stand-up special For What It's Worth3. That gave it a shared reference point long before it went viral online.

The internet version really took off with xkcd strip #149, "Sandwich," posted by Randall Munroe on August 28, 2006, in which one character refuses the request until the other reissues it as "sudo make me a sandwich"2. Within days the comic was picked up by Boing Boing, which called it "geek humor at its finest" and noted the joke only fully lands if you are a "Unix weenie"4. Wil Wheaton's blog and Ubuntu Forums threads amplified it further through September 20063.

By the early 2010s the line was common enough that it became a case study in online misogyny. A 2012 GeekGirlCon panel in Seattle discussed how "make me a sandwich" gets used to push women out of online spaces3. In June 2012, New York Post reporter Stephanie Smith turned the trope on its head with her blog 300 Sandwiches, documenting sandwiches she made for her boyfriend after he joked he would propose once she hit 3003.

How to Use This Meme

The phrase is typically deployed as a dismissive reply rather than a setup for a longer joke. The programmer-flavored version usually opens with `sudo`, treating the request as a command that needs root privileges to succeed, which is the punchline of the xkcd strip2. In broader use, people often swap in "sammich" for a folksier, more mocking tone3.

Frequently Asked Questions