# Make Me a Sandwich "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. ## Origin 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 slang[3]. 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]. - **Platform:** TV (Saturday Night Live) / xkcd (viral spread) - **Creator:** Tim Meadows (SNL sketch), Randall Munroe (xkcd popularization) - **Date:** 1995 ## 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 forums[3]. 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` prefix[2]. 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 today[4]. ## 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 Worth[3]. 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 2006[3]. 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 spaces[3]. 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 300[3]. ## How to Use 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 strip[2]. In broader use, people often swap in "sammich" for a folksier, more mocking tone[3]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Make Me a Sandwich? It is a catchphrase, often spelled "sammich," used online mostly by men to dismiss or troll women by invoking the old "women belong in the kitchen" trope[3]. ### Where did Make Me a Sandwich come from? The line "go make me a sandwich" was delivered by Tim Meadows' weatherman character on Saturday Night Live on December 16, 1995[1]. ### What does Make Me a Sandwich mean? It is a mock command that leans on a sexist stereotype, though the xkcd version treats it as a joke about the Unix `sudo` command overriding a refusal[2]. ### How do you use Make Me a Sandwich? People typically drop it as a one-line reply in comments or chat, sometimes prefixed with `sudo` for the programmer version popularized by xkcd[2]. ### Is Make Me a Sandwich still popular? It is a classic reference from the mid-2000s geek internet, best known through the 2006 xkcd strip that is still widely shared in tech circles[2]. ## References 1. [https://snltranscripts.jt.org/95/95imackey.phtml]() 2. [https://xkcd.com/149/]() 3. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/make-me-a-sandwich]() 4. [https://boingboing.net/2006/09/03/damned-funny-unix-hu.html]() 5. [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Make%20Me%20A%20Sandwich]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/make-me-a-sandwich Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library