<1905 “Small Boys Began to Shout ‘GET THE HOOK.’. . . As the convention of the Holy Jumpers grows older, the attendance increases, fully 300 men, women and boys being present at last evenings service. Brother C. L. Harvey preached last night. . . ‘The best educated person in the world today is the devil. Look out for him; he may be sitting at your side, or he may meet you as you leave this hall tonight.’ This last remark caused the delegates to groan and shout ‘God help us,’ while the audience began to shirt uneasily. ‘The way you live today,’ he said ‘is the way you will go to heaven or hell when you die.’ He had been speaking about ten minutes when some of the small boys began to shout, ‘GET THE HOOK.’ Brother Harvey at this point closed his address.”—
<1905 “No association game ever played in South Boston equaled in roughness the game between the Maley A. C. and the South Boston high second team . . . At all stages the players were mixing it up, the Maleys being the aggressors. Toward the end of the game the spectators cried ‘GET THE HOOK’ because the match had developed into a rough and tumble specialty.”—
<1906 “The election of water commissioner will probably come up at the next meeting of the city council . . . Anyhow, the meeting comes up on the twenty-third and Dr. S. F. A. Pickering informed the Herald man this . . . morning that he would GET THE HOOK on the twenty-third.”—
(New Hampshire),19 May, page 8> [[This predates Popik’s find below by a whopping 4 months!]]
<1906 “‘Mr. Osborne [
] referred to Mr. Dix as a descendent of one of the most illustrious families in the history of the state of New York [blah, blah blah]],
‘Get the hook,’ yelled a delegate. Chairman Nixon appealed in vain for order. ‘I propose to be heard if I stay here all night,’ declared Mr. Osborne.”—
New York Times, 27 September, page 2> [[Popik’s earliest quote is indicated in blue. I have expanded on this and have corrected a typo where he substituted ‘cried’ for ‘yelled.’]]
<1907 “Hissed Off the Stage by Angry Irishmen — 300 Go to Hammersteins to Stop a Caricature of Their Race . . . Hardly had the curtain gone up on the sketch of the Russell Brothers, who portray comic Irish servant girls, when screams and catcalls arose from the orchestra and galleries.
In all parts of the house men arose, shouting, ‘Take 'em off’ ‘Get the hook,’ ‘Away with 'em,’ ‘They're rotten.’”—
New York Times, 25 January, page 3> [[Popik’s quote is indicated in blue]]
<1908 “Has the slang of ‘
get the hook’ reached you? It originated with the ‘amateur nights’ in vaudeville, when aspirants are tried and usually found wanting. Sometimes the stage manager reached out with a hooked pole to pull the worst of them in. After the Washington start of ‘Miss Hook of Holland,’ one word in the title took on pertinency, for Frohman ‘
got the hook’ and jerked the principal two comedians out of it.”—
Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 January, page B3> [[Popik’s quote]]
<1929 “
AMATEUR NIGHT IS NO MORE; EVEN ITS NAME IS CHANGED. But Some New Yorkers Can Still Remember Audiences Shouting for ‘THE HOOK’. . . It is a question whether
the ‘hook’ started at Miner's or White's Atheneum - or somewhere else. The ‘hook,’ a long pole topped with a strong wire loop, was kept in a convenient corner off stage and few amateurs escaped its merciless pressure. GIVE HIM THE HOOK! was a famous expression, shouted vociferously by displeased listeners when thrown vegetables failed to clear the stage. Often the management knew that some of the acts were terrible, and booked them for no other purpose than to bring THE ‘HOOK’ into play and get a laugh from the audience.”—
New York Times, 17 February, page 138> [[Popik’s quote]]
<1932 “‘Did they yell “GET THE HOOK”?’ I asked. ‘SAY,’ he answered, ‘that was long before the expression came into vogue. In those days, if an act did not please the audience and they booed, the scene shifters would close the wings on it. On one wing would be a large N and on the other a large G.’”—
New York Times, 4 September, page SM8> [[Popik’s quote]]
<1937 “. . . I was a kid of 16. Discouraged, broke and hungry, I decided to make the first dollar in many weeks by appearing at Miner's Bowery Theater on an amateur program. This really took nerve, because in those days a Bowery audience was more likely to holler, ‘GIVE 'IM THE HOOK,’ than to shout, ‘Bravo.’”—
Eddie Cantor Looks Back on 25 Years in Theater in in
Washington Post, 17 October, page T1> [[Popik’s quote]]
<1975 “Now, amateur night got to be a football game. In Boston, ‘GET THE HOOK! [[figuratively]] at Gaiety Theatre was, GET THE HOOK!’ [[literally]]. You'd see an old woman out there singin' . . . ‘Is there any souls in heaven . . . ,’ and they’d holler ‘HOOK! HOOK! Pretty soon they decided to make gags out of this . . . , like I would go do an old woman, just to GET THE HOOK.”—
Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 27, No. 3, Popular Theatre, October, page 332-333> [[Interview with Steve Mills (born 1895) who began as a candy butcher (a walking vendor who sold sweets) in burlesque theaters, graduated to an amateur singer there in 1910, and whose 65 years in show business was closely associated with burlesque.]]
<1985 “. . . at the end of the summer, the final gathering . . .is a festive poetry reading in which everybody gets three minutes to recite their own poetry. . . . Enforcing the rule was the Official Timer, a student standing near the podium with a stop watch and a shepherd’s crook. As the time limit approached, there was a gentle tapping on the floor, increasing in pace and volume until, with shouts of ‘GET THE HOOK,’ violators were unceremoniously pulled from the stage.”—
Rhetoric Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, September> [[this summer writing program founded by Alan Ginsberg in 1974 is held each year at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado]]
<2000-2008 “(
silent film) Amateur Night; or, GET PUT THE HOOK; AKA {Amateur Night; or, GET THE HOOK} American, B&W: 500 feet, Directed by (unknown), Cast: (unknown). The Vitagraph Company of America production; distributed by The Vitagraph Company of America. / Standard 35mm spherical 1.37:1 format. / The film was first advertised in trades or reviewed in April 1907.”—at
www.silentera.com> [[Popik’s quote]]
<2002 “The criteria are spelled out in eight questions the grantees have to answer during the site review . . . and those who don’t have good answers GET THE HOOK.”—
Science, New Series, Vol. 296, No. 5572, 24 May, page 1390>
<2005 “Whorehouse Days in Gilbert GET THE HOOK: . . . business owners in a tiny . . . town [Gilbert] decided to call their new summer festival Whorehouse Days [[a reference to its notorious early days]], . . . Offended by the word ‘whorehouse,’ local residents mounted a loud backlash against the festival and recently spurred Gilbert City Council members to kill the two-day bash.”—
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, Minnesota), 7 July>
<2008 “While Runde said the Dubuque County Jail doesn't have a specific banned list, any publication administrators deem disruptive can GET THE HOOK.”—
Telegraph - Herald (Dubuque, Iowa), 28 March>
