On tiny Hornby Island northwest of Vancouver, after the Women’s World Cup in the summer of 2015, our bed-and-breakfast host was telling us about the town. The pizza place in the park is terrific, he said, but things get crowded during music nights on Wednesday and Sunday. “It’s a bit of a gong show down there.”
I’m old enough to remember The Gong Show from its short but culturally outsized run on network TV in the late 1970s. Hosted by Chuck Barris—who would later claim in a memoir that he was a CIA assassin—The Gong Show paraded a series of low-rent comedy and music acts whose performances were scored by a panel of C-list celebrities, or gonged off the stage. The show trafficked in stale bits with a twist, and sexual innuendo. But it also mocked America’s infatuation with “talent,” and flipped the bird at the earnest variety shows that had polluted prime time for decades.
I figured that our Canadian host meant that the music nights at the pizza place were like the acts on the old TV show—goofy, amateurish, bad. But then he said that Vancouver was a bit of a gong show. And the line for the ferry was a bit of a gong show, too. Gong show, it became clear, was a Canadian figure of speech and more akin to another characteristic of the TV program: chaos. The Gong Show routinely devolved into thrown props, a howling audience, and, when Gene Gene the Dancing Machine appeared in a green windbreaker and bell-bottoms and boogied to Count Basie’s “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” mayhem on the set.
Not long after that trip, I began embedding with Merriam-Webster, the dictionary publisher. I had written a story about Merriam’s online overhaul of its 2,700-page, 1961 masterwork, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. I stuck around the company’s Springfield, Mass., headquarters to learn the craft of lexicography and write a book. I had my own cubicle and a key to the back door. It was a ton of fun.
Like dumpster fire, which the American Dialect Society picked as the 2016 Word of the Year, gong show reflected our new Trumpian reality. The world had gone off the rails. It was a clusterfuck. A shitshow. A goat rodeo (an apparent derivation of a 1970s military slang term, goat fuck, which also grew in the 2000s). I added gong show to Merriam’s spreadsheet of potential dictionary entries and started to unravel its history.
My first stop was on the opposite side of the editorial floor from my desk—rows of filing cabinets holding 16 million slips of paper with examples of word usage. The slips date from the early 1900s to the early 2000s, when everything went digital. I opened a G drawer and flicked through the cards: gong bell, gong buoy, gong drum, gong-gong, gong man, gong metal, gong punch, gongsmith. But no gong show. Its absence demonstrated the shortcomings of lexicography in the analog age. If an editor didn’t take a “citation”—an example of usage from a print source—and stick it in the files, there was nothing to build a definition around.
Databases were way more efficient. Nexis and Newspapers.com revealed that shortly after The Gong Show debuted on NBC in 1976, gong show was adopted as a synonym for talent show. Schools, churches, and towns staged events modeled after and named for the show. But there was also early metaphorical use. “That was the National Football League’s ballyhooed showcase?” Allen Abel, a columnist for the Toronto-based Globe and Mail, wrote after the Dallas Cowboys’ 27-10 win over the Denver Broncos at Super Bowl 12 in January 1978. “Heck, that was the Gong Show on Astroturf.” Abel cited a dropped punt, a missed field goal, and a too-many-men-on-the-field penalty. In other words, the game was second-rate.
By the 1990s, usage of gong show was tilting toward The Gong Show’s signature disarray. “It’s not a gong show like it used to be,” Boston City Council member (and future mayor) Thomas Menino said of the body in 1990; the council’s president Christopher Iannella, Menino said, “runs the meetings professionally and fairly.” Two years later, Iannella himself insisted, “We are not a Ringling Circus. Nobody could ever refer to us as a gong show.” (The Boston Globe asked, “Has [Iannella] been watching a lot of TV lately?”) In 1992, Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell quoted an MLB team owner about a new committee designed to run the game: “What a ‘Gong Show’ that’s going to be.”
That’s how Boswell transcribed the quotation—he assumed it was a reference to the TV show. But the unidentified owner might have been from Montreal or Toronto, because in Canada the sense of gong show as shitshow was taking off. The sale of Calgary’s football team was "a gong show from the very beginning,” a Calgary Herald columnist wrote in 1996. The Toronto Maple Leafs of the 1970s and ’80s? “That was a Gong show,” an ex-player was quoted as saying in 1998 in the Hamilton Spectator. In 2000, the marketing director of a new racetrack told the Kamloops Daily News that “Saturday and Sunday will be a ‘gong show.’” Note the quotation marks. Editors and writers still felt the need to flag gong show as a reference.
For the years 1977–2000, I found around 200 examples of the phrase “a gong show” in Nexis, which isn’t very many. From 2001–10, though, the number jumped fivefold, and kept rising. Fueling the growth: At some point, gong show became distinct Canadian hockey lingo for a game gone haywire, or a player who was generally out of control:
The Alberta Junior Hockey League recently introduced a two-fight rule—a player can have two fights in a game before being tossed. It’s producing goon hockey—“a gong show for the last 10 minutes of the game,” according to one player—and potentially keeping skilled players out of the game.
—Mike Board, Calgary Herald, June 21, 1999
He’s a player who brings a physical presence and protects his teammates. There was a time he was a gong show, but we don't see that now. He handles himself.
—Canadian hockey coach Rod Davidson, quoted in the Indianapolis Star, December 8, 2000
After Canada won men’s ice hockey gold at the 2002 Winter Olympics, a witness described the locker-room scene: “Gretz brought the loonie in the room and everybody went nuts. It was a gong show in there.” Translation: Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, the executive director of the team, showed the victorious players a dollar coin that had been encased for good luck under the ice at the Salt Lake City arena. By this point, gong show was a two-way Canadian player, on the ice and off. Later that year, a Conservative party politician complained about the Liberal party government. “What a gong show. They rip the country off and we give them more money.”
Words migrate. They ride on airplanes and optic fibers over mountains and under oceans, thumb their noses at state and national borders. Gong show started in Hollywood and made its way north. To find out why, I called Dennis Storoshenko, a Vancouver native and linguistics professor at the University of Calgary, who had blogged about gong show after realizing that the phrase was a Canadianism. “It was literally just a bunch of us out at a party,” he told me, “and somebody said something was a gong show and the one guy from Massapequa, New York, looked at us and said, ‘What?’”
Gong show’s diffusion was likely happenstance. Storoshenko said that after gong show was adopted as a synonym for talent show, some unknown “innovators” stretched it to minor hockey, “which is in a sense a talent show.” From there, gong show might have been an eggcorn, a word “mistakenly used in a seemingly logical or plausible way for another word or phrase,” per Merriam. So, Storoshenko explained, “if you hear the phrase and you have no idea what the original Gong Show was, but you just assume it’s just a group of rowdy, chaotic people, you might think that’s what it was.”
But gong show also exudes Canada—or a caricature of Canada. It’s benign, understated. Stick an eh? after It’s a bit of a gong show and decide for yourself. On the former Twitter, I tallied nearly 300 mentions of gong show over 30 days in 2016, most written by Canadians and many about hockey. Gong show was deployed to describe everything, including New York’s JFK airport, a Washington Capitals–Philadelphia Flyers playoff game, “finding outfits that work with the weather and the dress code,” the last five laps of the Indianapolis 500, a Guns N’ Roses reunion tour, the debate over assisted suicide, Georgia Tech’s search for a new basketball coach, the office after coworkers have had sex with one another, and the U.S. itself.
I got in touch with a couple of Americans who used gong show that month. Both happened to live in D.C., as do I. One was my friend Dan Steinberg, at the time a sports columnist for the Washington Post. Steinberg was covering one of those Caps-Flyers games in Philadelphia, during which home fans hurled giveaway light-up wristbands onto the ice during a 6-1 loss. “What a gong show,” he tweeted. “The wristbands were really cool too.” Replied one commenter, “Are you trying to use hockey lingo? Adorable.”
Steinberg was born in 1976, the year The Gong Show debuted, but he had no childhood connection, and he isn’t Canadian. “Well, I mean, I know vaguely (without Googling) that it was like a TV talent show thing where contestants were gonged off the stage if they were bad?” he emailed. “Or that’s what I thought, anyhow. I have no idea how it transitioned from that into a phrase meaning ‘farcical embarrassment,’ which is how people use it on Twitter. Kind of like a synonym for ‘collapsed circus tent,’ or ‘dumpster fire,’ or all those other Twitter cliches.”
But Steinberg didn’t pin his gong show knowledge to hockey. He suspected he might have picked it up from his Post sports colleague Adam Kilgore, who grew up in Maine, which borders Canada, or possibly from D.C. sports talk radio. Kilgore told me he first heard it covering baseball. “Players and coaches would throw it around to describe preposterous/disastrous plays,” he said. More linguistic diffusion.
My other local was Republican political strategist Liam Donovan, a D.C. native with no Canada connection who also was too young to have watched the original show. When Donovan tweeted “What a gong show,” it was in reply to a New York Times story about Trump campaign chaos. “My friends have been using it as far back as I can remember,” Donovan said. At his all-boys high school, Gonzaga, “calling something ‘a show’ was our way of saying something was a ridiculous or absurd spectacle. Gong was added/subtracted somewhere along the line.” Like Steinberg, Donovan also thought it might have come from D.C. sports talk radio. “Could have been rooted there, but I’m not positive.”
I wondered if Chuck Barris knew about his linguistic influence. His reps were no help. But I tracked down The Gong Show’s executive producer, Chris Bearde, an Englishman with a long list of American television credits. Bearde wrote for the subversive Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. He produced a comeback TV show for Elvis Presley, and specials for Bob Hope, Bill Cosby, The Jackson 5, The Osmonds, Diana Ross, and Lucille Ball. On the phone from Los Angeles, Bearde told me he met Barris while co-producing a variety show in Canada. Barris, a hockey fan, invited Bearde to a Los Angeles Kings game, where Barris said he had a deal with NBC to produce an amateur talent show and didn’t know what to do with it.
“I said we should do a really bad one, and do it as satire,” Bearde recalled. An audition drew a line of performers around the block. “We chose half a dozen of these acts and showed them to Chuck. He says, ‘I can’t show this to my peers in this town. It’s too ridiculous, Chris.’ I said, ‘You do The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game’! He said, ‘But this is different.’”
Barris agreed to tape a demo. They staged it on the news set of a San Francisco TV station. Bearde paid the judges—the game-show regulars Jo Anne Worley, Arte Johnson, Richard Dawson, and Adrienne Barbeau—with a limo ride and Chinese food. “People in the audience were laughing so much that they were actually falling out of seats into aisles,” he said. “The last act was a girl from Encino who sang ‘Memories’ dead flat.” Watching from the rear of the studio, Barris and the NBC executives greenlit the show.
The Gong Show’s original daytime run on NBC ended amid complaints about risqué content, especially the “Popsicle Twins”—two teenagers who sat cross-legged on the stage while suggestively licking popsicles. (Panelist Jaye P. Morgan gave them a 10, saying, “Do you know that’s the way I started?” Morgan was later fired from the show for flashing her breasts during a Gene Gene the Dancing Machine segment.) Some actual talent appeared on The Gong Show: preteen singer Andrea McArdle before she starred in Annie on Broadway; Paul Reubens before he was Pee-wee Herman; the singer Boxcar Willie. David Letterman was an occasional panelist.
(Someone who wasn’t on the show: former Baltimore Ravens head coach Brian Billick. News stories at least as far back as 2006 have claimed that Billick performed a bit called the “Spider Monkey” on the show, and Wikipedia repeats the claim. When I couldn’t find confirmation, I wrote to Billick. “I was never on the Gong Show,” he replied. “Only the Match Game.” Indeed, in 1977, wearing a taupe leather jacket and pastel yellow shirt with giant collars, Billick was a contestant on the saucy game show Match Game PM. “Up till a few weeks ago I was playing professional football, which terminated quickly,” he told host Gene Rayburn.)
Bearde told me The Gong Show's name was an homage to the opening credits of films produced by J. Arthur Rank, dating to the 1930s: a bare-chested guy beating a gigantic gong. (Among Rank’s movies: Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, A Night to Remember about the Titanic, and … The Gang Show, about a singing Boy Scout troop.) “It came right out of my head,” Bearde said of the TV title. “We told the talent, ‘When you see an act you don’t like, please gong.’”
To recap: Bearde met Barris in Canada. They mapped out the show at an NHL game. Barris wielded a hockey stick to shoo off gonged guests. Bearde told me—this was in 2016—that a new Gong Show revival was in the works. Its producer? The Canadian actor Will Arnett. Its host? The comedian Mike Myers—also Canadian. When I explained gong show’s lexical journey, Bearde seemed genuinely thrilled that people remembered the original show, and the phrase it popularized. “It’s great to have it put into something as serious as the slang of a whole entire country,” he said.
Two countries. But neither the United States nor Canada had included gong show in its dictionaries. It wasn’t even in A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, a 1967 book that had just wrapped a decade-long online revision. The update added more than a thousand entries and senses, from aboriginal to zunga (“a rope hung close to shore so that the user can swing out from the bank and plunge into the water”). The new entries received comprehensive treatment; eh ran to nearly 5,000 words. But gong show wasn’t among them.
I called the editor-in-chief, Stefan Dollinger, a linguist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I told Dollinger about Chuck Barris and Hornby Island and Dennis Storoshenko’s research. During work on the Canadianisms dictionary, Dollinger said, his wife had suggested gong show. Inundated by other candidate words, he dismissed it as American. Now he was reconsidering. Using the dictionary’s typology, he said gong show might be a Type 2 Canadianism, a word that started life elsewhere but was now decidedly Canadian.
To determine a word’s Canadian-ness, Dollinger and his staff devised a method of “normalizing” Google searches for a handful of English-speaking countries to adjust for the size of the domain. That bit of what’s known as computational lexicography allowed the editors to compare the frequency of a term on the internet in Canada to its frequency elsewhere. Canada, with 34 “index points,” came out on top for gong show, followed by New Zealand and Australia. Despite the best efforts of American hockey fans, gong show tallied a measly 0.2 in the United States. The data backed up Dollinger’s initial conclusion: Type 2 Canadianism. But that didn’t ensure that gong show would be entered anytime soon—Dollinger’s project ran out of money.
To get gong show into Merriam-Webster, I didn’t have to worry about funding, only legitimacy. I thought my case was strong. More than 20 entries in Merriam’s online unabridged dictionary carried the label Canada. (The Canada-est? I vote for beverage room, “a hotel barroom that serves only beer”). And gong show had plenty of examples of use in mainstream and social media. It looked like a legit candidate. I drafted a definition—
noun informal, chiefly Canadian 1 : something (such as an event, place, person, or circumstance) marked by chaos, incompetence, or unprofessionalism 2 : an amateur talent show
—and appended a bunch of citations. I also wrote a tidy, seven-sentence historical explainer known as a Supplemental Information Note. And then I waited.
Fourteen other words I defined made it into Merriam’s online lexicon, a bunch of them sports terms: the basketball sense of posterize; a baseball sense of run meaning to eject from a game (that was cool—a 31st verb sense of one of the most complex words in the dictionary); dogpile; headbutt; GOAT. I also flagged but didn’t define pickleball and slash line. As I was wrapping up my reporting, Steve Perrault, Merriam’s amazingly titled director of defining, told me that gong show was “obviously something that should get in at some point.”
That point hasn’t arrived. I was scooped by the Oxford English Dictionary, which entered gong show in 2020, with a first usage for the chaos sense from 1982, a quotation from a member of Canada’s House of Commons about a debate over energy policy ("that two-week gong show—the battle between the dingbats and the ding-a-lings”). And the revived Dictionary of Canadianisms this June added 137 new terms, including you know what, defined as “a disastrous, chaotic or comical situation.”
“The generalized meaning of ‘chaos’ is something distinctly Canadian,” the entry notes proudly, adding that while gong show “has been adopted into the specialized jargon of ‘hockey bro’ culture,” it is “no longer restricted to political or sports contexts but has been generalized to all areas.”
Before my book, Unabridged, was published last month, I checked in on gong show. Just as the Canadians had asserted, it remained a five-tool, cross-border word. A Mobile, Ala., dementia services organization held a Gong Show–style fundraiser. A Toronto columnist wrote that anti-Israel protests made a political campaign event “a notable gong show.” Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said the Justice Department was “equal parts gangster and gong show.” A Jacksonville Jaguars–Miami Dolphins joint practice was “a gong show of scuffles, thrown punches and occasionally all-out brawls.” The Ryder Cup in September? “Unruly U.S. fans turned golf into a gong show." And of course, there was plenty of hockey. “Canucks are a gong show,” a Vancouver newspaper said.
Back when I was cosplaying as a lexicographer, I missed a March 2017 commentary in The New Yorker titled “The Gong Show, With Donald Trump.” It was written a week after Chuck Barris died at age 87, and a month before Chris Bearde died at 80. The piece applied the TV meaning: Trump, the former game-show host, gonging off early hires Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Andrew Puzder. Those chuds and cronies have been replaced by an even more evil lineup of acts. America, still a gong show, more than ever.
