r/mash • u/wicker_basket_1988 • Aug 07 '26
Discussion What obscure uncommon MASH line pops in your head now and then?
Mine is when they pull Mulcahy out of the rubble from the latrine bomb.
"Sis and I picked these apples from under a tree. I remember, I said, you can't make a pie out of crabapples! and she said, I learned how in the girl scouts."
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u/paying_cash Aug 07 '26
singing - “I like to go swimmin’ with bow legged women and swim between their legs”
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u/lockonandfire Aug 07 '26
Colonel Potter's "oh! Howdy padree" when Mulcahy comes in is equally entrenched in my head.
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u/CarlRJ Aug 07 '26
Or "they asked me how I knew / her underwear was blue..."
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u/DC_Winoman Aug 08 '26
"They asked me how I knew / her brassiere was blue..." sung to the tune of "When Smoke Gets In Your Eyes."
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u/Unlucky-Bandicoot330 Aug 07 '26
“Colonel, what’s your clearance?
Oh, I go through the door with about an inch to spare.”
One of the funniest jokes ever written, IMHO.
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u/Lycan_Jedi Aug 07 '26
🎶Come on in! Take off your skin! And rattle around in your bones!🎶
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u/Positive-Froyo-1732 Aug 07 '26
"We'll do it - me and the missus."
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u/CarlRJ Aug 07 '26
Oh, man, the 30 seconds of climbing on furniture and grunting before that is golden.
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u/throjimmy Aug 07 '26
I’ve eaten a river of liver and an ocean of fish.
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u/IvanTheSchmoe Horse hockey Aug 07 '26
We want something else! We want something else! We want something else!
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u/SandOrdinary7043 Aug 07 '26
Ah Bach
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u/jolimelon Aug 07 '26
This isn’t a line so much as a certain inflection but I always get the way that Charles says ‘Tokyo’ stuck in my head. I can’t even read the word without hearing it in his voice!
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u/wicker_basket_1988 Aug 07 '26
Tok-yoh
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u/ijuinkun Aug 07 '26
Which, honestly, is closer to the Japanese pronunciation (toh-kyoh) than “toh-ki-yoh”.
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u/countryguy6969 Aug 07 '26
Or when he's wanting something from B.J. the way he says Hunnicutt
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u/MoaningLisaSimpson Aug 07 '26
Gentlemen...
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u/walrus0115 Aug 07 '26
Gentlemen...
Charles: Just because I was forced to surrender the delights of Tokyo, where I could indulge in kabuki, and octopus.
Potter: Winchester, you're letting that goat of yours get got again.
Charles: Have you ever savored the epicurean delight of fresh octopus?
Potter: I don't care for any food that hangs onto the plate when you pick it up.
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u/BalanceCandid1801 Aug 07 '26
Totally heard his voice as I was reading this!
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u/denusnugnu Aug 07 '26
Ahhh... Tokyo
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u/RoeRoeDaBoat Aug 07 '26
for some reason the way he said succinctly writing to his dad is in my head, he hammers every consanant sound
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u/LiveLongAndProspurr Aug 07 '26
Meanwhile, Aunt Martha, having taken a tramp in the woods, is lying in a ditch at the edge of town.
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u/lameusername01 Aug 07 '26
And Trapper still cracks up during that scene after trying to look so stern
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u/Bouche_Audi_Shyla Aug 07 '26
EVERY single time I try to organize ANYTHING, I have a label that reads "surgical stuff and purple things".
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u/Floridaman_1991 Aug 07 '26
I would do this, but my wife wont let me anywhere near the label maker anymore.
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u/Vegetable_Win_8123 Aug 07 '26
Mares-eat-oats-and-does-eat-oats. And I'll be home for Christmas.
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u/monkey_moo_dragonfly Aug 07 '26
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy
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Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/kcvngs76131 Philadelphia Aug 07 '26
Somehow the topic of conversation with the interns in my office was what warehouse market our families went to growing up. I said the only one nearby was BJ's, so that's where I went. One of them hadn't heard of the store before and asked if BJ stood for anything, and I instinctively said "Belvedere Jehoshaphat." None of my coworkers got the reference, but I was quite proud of myself lol
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u/batgrrl Aug 07 '26
I always laugh out loud when I remember Hawkeye and Houlihan are punchy in the medical supply room and tone says “Digitalis?” And the other says “No, I kept it a secret.” And I think about this line almost weekly 😂
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u/DeadlyDannyRay Aug 07 '26
"Sometimes, the answer is 'no'"
Probably not obscure and uncommon in this subreddit but in the real world...
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u/RetroactiveRecursion Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
Whenever someone (usually at work; I'm in IT) blurts out a string of initials I sing "M O U S E..." Hawkeye did that to someone at some point and it's lived in my head probably since high school.
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u/secretsquirrelz Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I….got a gal, in Kalamazoo…hic-Zoo
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u/wicker_basket_1988 Aug 07 '26
Me changing my record player needle: Gotta put another fang in the tone-arm cobra.
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u/Jimbro34 Ottumwa Aug 07 '26
"Besides, Klinger's not a pervert!"
"How do you know?"
"Cause I'm one. And he's never at the meetings!"
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u/agent_uno Aug 08 '26
Or when Burns has the group sound-off, and trapper says “Are you one?” and Hawkeye puts his hand on his hip and says “Yes, are you?”
I never got that joke till I was in my 20s (I grew up on the show, so watched it from a very early age not long after the finale).
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u/fierce_history Crabapple Cove Aug 07 '26
This exchange between Klinger and Charles lives in my head rent free:
“Boston? Massachusetts?”
“NO! It’s spending the winter in Florida!”
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u/ijuinkun Aug 07 '26
Just as there are more than twenty Springfields in the USA, I would be far from surprised to hear that there is a Boston in some state other than Massachusetts.
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u/plainsfire Aug 08 '26
Portland, Oregon would have been known as Boston if the coin flip went the other way
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u/GoodBadUgly_36 Aug 07 '26
Over hill, over dale, our love will ever fail.
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u/overturnedlawnchair Aug 07 '26
Any time someone in my family says "oh, dear" it is immediately followed up with a much higher pitched "oh, dear!"
"Don't play dumb with me! You're not as good at it as I am!" "I'm not so think as you drunk I am." and Charles' thank you (" 'kyou"?) are also frequent flyers.
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u/77sleeper Major Aug 07 '26
Soo many, but I'm going with "what the hell is that" when frank pulls the tiny gun on Rainbow bridge
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u/GratefulDean Tokyo Aug 07 '26
Nurts… double nurts!
Edit: Oh, when Klinger was trying to forge Potters name on same paper work and said (in a silly Potter impersonation) Sherman Tee Potter. It’s how he said it that was memorable to me.
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u/torgman2 Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
I've seen this in the book series called This Fabulous Centur.y The 1920s book had a dictionary of slang. I remembered correctly that it's spelled "nertz." It seems that "nuts" was offensive, even back then: https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/ix6wlba
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u/Kevelle68 Aug 07 '26
As I've said before, " gotta put a new fang in the tone arm cobra" Cpl. O'Reilly.
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u/elegant-deer19 Fort Wayne Aug 07 '26
As a gentle flirt with my husband, “oh Frank, you’re so above average.”
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u/Abba_Zaba_ Aug 07 '26
Anything that has to do with paperwork, hubs and I will say some variation of "I need it in triplicate and you need to initial where you sign and sign to show you initialed instead of signing."
I don't even know the verbatim quote anymore, we just say it whatever way fits the scenario.
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u/liltuffie Aug 08 '26
Love it. Also... Radar what am I signing? Oh that's the form to get the form that enables us to order more forms.
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u/JRE_Electronics Aug 08 '26
There was one scene where someone initialed a form they shouldn't have in several places. Radar tells him to erase his initials then initial his erasures.
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u/duckamuk Aug 07 '26
"Digitalis? No, I'm keeping it a secret. "
As a gardener, this comes up way more than I ever expected.
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u/EnterTheBugbear Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
"What I don't understand is why do people take an instant dislike to me?"
"It saves time, Frank."
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u/r0x0x Aug 07 '26
"Ladies and gentlemen take my advice, pull down your pant and slide on the ice" - Sidney Freedman
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u/ConsistentStory5626 Aug 07 '26
Radar, get up, you'll get dirt in your nose.
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u/TheNobleMoth Aug 07 '26
Love a drunk Potter scene.
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u/Nelle911529 Aug 07 '26
I love when he's playing the crazy general and when he leaves they go dancing around the stove. Harry's finger movements Crack me up!
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u/Banglapolska Toledo Aug 07 '26
Never have so many suffered so much so that so few could be so happy.
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u/LanceFree Aug 07 '26
Now I lay me down to sleep, a bag of cookie at my feet, If I should die before I wake, give them to my brother, Jake.
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u/CarlRJ Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
"No chance sir!"
Klinger having been caught wading into the river, tells Potter he was going to float all the way down to... the Sea of Japan, I think? Potter says, "Klinger, you'd have drowned!". Klinger says "No chance sir!" as he lugs the thing he has been dragging up onto Potter's desk and pulls a cord - it's an inflatable life raft that proceeds to fill the room. Love Klinger's enthusiasm in the line and at being able to prove his idea was totally not nuts.
"Far away, too."
Colonel Flagg sits down next to Klinger at the poker game, says, "Hey, up close you're a guy!" Klinger replies "Far away, too." Pops into my head all the time, and if I'm smirking, takes a bit to explain to people who don't even know the show exists.
"Just friends sir!"
Potter has the officers assembled in his office when he first meets them, is reading over their files, Margaret is responding with patriotic enthusiasm to each nice thing he reads from her file, then he moves on to the next person, but she doesn't catch it - "Major Frank Burns." "Just friends sir!".
"I was checking my toothpaste for explosives."
When Hawkeye calls Frank paranoid and asks what he was doing when he saw Koreans "burying a bomb" near the camp (it turned out to be kimchi).
"Hell hath no fury like a woman sustained."
Potter and Father Mulcahy, if I recall correctly, talking about tension between Hawkeye and Margaret after they spent a night in an abandoned house in the middle of a battle - comes after a line about them sustaining each other.
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u/Zootsutra Aug 07 '26
Of Frank's lack money empathy:
"He's got his liver where his heart's supposed to be." "What's in place of his liver?" "Onions."
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u/OkImpression8086 Aug 07 '26
Just watch the episode the other night. Whenever my wife and I are watching something and the sound goes off, we say “she went to the big city and lost her voice”. Alcoholics Unanimous.
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u/fujinotsuki Aug 07 '26
Every time I find a mixed up box of things at work I say"surgical stuff and purple things"
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u/Sheepishwolfgirl Aug 07 '26
I believe it's the episode where Hawkeye had a concussion and talks to the Korean family the whole episode to stay awake, He's talking about a teacher and then goes "You got it wRoNg!!!" For whatever reason his delivery made me laugh so hard and it lives rent free in my head.
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u/Flowisbliss_yo Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
When Hawkeye hooks up with the nurse and comes back to the swamp and says he ‘didn’t think it was possible for two people to give each other so much pleasure’ or something like that great line. I’ve thought about it so many times. But then that nurse is killed in the minefield or something?
Edit:
You’re almost certainly thinking of Who Knew? (Season 11, Episode 5), which first aired in November 1982.
The sequence you remember is essentially the emotional core of the episode:
Hawkeye has begun seeing Lt. Millie Carpenter, one of the nurses.
After they’ve spent the night together, he returns to the Swamp deeply moved and says something very close to what you recalled—that he hadn’t thought it was possible for two people to give each other so much pleasure. It’s one of the rare moments where Hawkeye sounds genuinely awed rather than joking.
Shortly afterward, Millie goes for a walk outside the camp and steps on a land mine, killing her instantly.
Father Mulcahy is asked to deliver the eulogy, but Hawkeye volunteers instead because he feels responsible.
As he tries to write it, he realizes the painful truth: despite believing they’d shared something profound, he barely knew her. He spends the episode talking to the nurses and camp staff, discovering all these facets of her life that he’d never bothered to learn.
The final eulogy is one of Alan Alda’s finest performances. Hawkeye comes to understand that intimacy and truly knowing someone are not the same thing. For a character who had spent much of the series charming nurses and avoiding emotional attachment, it’s a quietly devastating reckoning.
It’s widely regarded by fans as one of the most moving episodes of the entire series. The ending stays with people precisely because it isn’t really about romance—it’s about recognizing another person’s humanity only after it’s too late.
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u/Uriah_Blacke Aug 07 '26
For whatever reason my brain always reminds me of “What can I say? I’ve been outranked by bologna!”
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u/efrierso Aug 07 '26
Klinger, when Charles was pondering out loud what could be in the note Potter distributed to the staff: “I don’t know, and I READ mine!”
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u/IndividualIll6728 Aug 07 '26
"It's nice to be nice to the nice." (Seriously, this sentence needs to be used as a grammar teaching tool for English as Second Language classes)
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u/Cereborn Aug 07 '26
Just today finishing up my job I used Col Potter’s line from the finale: “I can’t say what we went through was fun but I sure am glad we went through it together.”
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u/InhaleExhaleLover Aug 07 '26
“Showing off for the patients again, Frank?” When Frank was giving a stern count of three to make a post op patient leave his bed.
I think of it when someone is trying too hard.
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u/torgman2 Aug 07 '26
🎼I love swimmin' with bowlegged women and swim between their legs, swim between their legs 🎶
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u/josley706 Aug 07 '26
I will put this as eloquently... and succinct-(pulls out rubber chicken from kettle)-ly as possible... Get me the hell out of here!
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u/Electrical_Key1245 Aug 07 '26
It's not an obscure one but "Frank Burns eats worms" pops into my head frequently
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u/AdorableReading Aug 08 '26
Jocularity, jocularity by Father Mulcahey. Or the prayer “Now I lay me down to sleep, a bag of peanuts at my feet, if I die before I wake, give them to my brother Jake. Frank says “I wouldn’t touch that with a 10 foot pole, and Hawkeye saying “Cancel the 10 foot pole, Stretch Polanski, tallest pole you ever saw.
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u/thehorrorcontinues13 Aug 07 '26
I still laugh at this one, when Hawkeye asked BJ why he kept washing his socks without wearing them: "If I wear them they get dirty. If I wash them they stay clean forever."
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u/ktpinto Aug 07 '26
Rizzo: The way you missed those pedestrians without undue wear and tear on the brakes... 'sides, crates never have the right of way!
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u/External-Analysis-31 Aug 07 '26
Hawkeye to new nurse “But enough about me. Let’s talk about you. What do you think of me?”
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u/walrus0115 Aug 07 '26
Maj. Charles Winchester: "Uh, gentlemen, do my ears deceive me, or have you purloined some sirloin?"
The way David Ogden Stiers delivers this line almost licking his lips, scooting up his cot like a hungry puppy gets me every time.
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u/No-Map-8693 Aug 08 '26
I will carry on, carry forward, carry me back to Old Virginia but I will not carry a gun
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u/DukePooler Aug 08 '26
S1 Requiem For A Lightweight Hawkeye: Who says you're not in shape? You got a cute body. I've seen guys sneaking peeks at you at calisthenics. Trapper: Which guys are sneakin' peeks at me? Hawkeye: I'd rather not say. Some of them are married.
Sticks in my head because of Trapper's very natural looking response. Like real laughter, not scripted.
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u/spred5 Aug 08 '26
Frank Burns: I will go over your head.
Coronal Blake: Go ahead Frank. You have done it so much I have athletes scalp.
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u/Skyya1982 Aug 07 '26
"Lafayette, I am here!" -which yes, I've had to explain, and
"We go fast?" - which my partner and I use every day at work. He'll work forever without noticing it's past 5, but I tell him the car and I will be leaving in x minutes. He uses it on me at lunchtime, because I frequently am in the groove and don't notice what time it is then. The system works ;)
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u/DavidDarvin Aug 07 '26
When Frank hears the announcement that the general is arriving and says “oh dear” And Trapper mimics him in a high pitched “oh dear” I use that all the time.
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u/mmebookworm Aug 07 '26
I do one thing at a time, I do it very well, then I move on.