The dog ate my homework

In popular culture

In 1989 the popular sitcom Saved By The Bell debuted. Its theme song included the line "the dog ate all my homework last night."^[1] Thus embedded in the American consciousness, it would be exploited for comic purposes in other television shows and comic strips. Users of the popular TV Tropes website have devoted a page to collecting examples from various popular media.^[15]
It became an occasional running gag on The Simpsons, which also began airing that year, mostly playing off Bart's tendency to offer ridiculous excuses for all sorts of misconduct to his teacher Mrs. Krabappel. In a 1992 episode, a difficult day for Bart begins with Santa's Little Helper, the family dog, eating his homework. "I didn't know dogs actually did that," he says, and finds his teacher equally incredulous since he had used that excuse before.^[16] In a later episode, when the dog goes to work for the police, Bart must eat his own homework for the excuse to work.^[17] When Mrs. Krabappel begins dating Ned Flanders, the Simpsons' neighbor, at the end of the 2011 season, she sees Santa's Little Helper in the Simpsons' yard and asks if he is the dog who has eaten Bart's homework so many times. Bart's attempts to demonstrate this and thus lend credibility to his use of the excuse backfire.^[18]
Comic strips that feature anthropomorphized dogs as characters have found the concept of those characters eating homework a source of humor. In one of his Far Side panels, Gary Larson depicted a classroom of dogs whose teacher asks, "Did anyone here not eat his or her homework on the way to school?"^[19] In a 1991 Dilbert strip, a boy on the street asks Dogbert to chew on his homework so he can have the excuse; in the last panel the boy, beaten, is shown in class claiming a dog made him eat it.^[20]
There have been three different books that used the excuse as a title. Two have been collections of poetry for students with a school theme,^[21][22] and one has been a business book about lessons dogs can teach about accountability.^[23] Other books for young readers have had titles blaming aliens^[24] and the protagonist's teacher^[25] for the missing homework. A two-act children's musical called A Monster Ate My Homework has also been written.^[26]
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Abstract

Done by: Tyan Milana
Checked by: Dilyara Bahtiyarovna